RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on multiple hard disks that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is divided into separate ones via virtualization software. Either way, the same data is kept on all drives and the basic advantage of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synced on it.