Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all function as a single unit where information is stored. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all the drives is the same at all times, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also better because the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that work 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 security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which 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 if any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.