RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on several hard drives that work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same info is stored on all the drives and the basic benefit of using this type of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the information 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 won't be interrupted and it'll continue working smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.