RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the exact 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 stored on quick NVMe drives which work 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 another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.