RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Any content which 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 work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept 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 flawlessly until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synced on it.