RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the data will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning flawlessly until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.