RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessed from 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 depending on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your 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 saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the info 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 operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.