RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.