RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.