RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the 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 many others. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.