Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where info is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives is identical at all times, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary based on the exact setup - whether info is written on all drives real-time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working flawlessly until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.