Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all perform as a single unit where information is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives shall be the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

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