Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as one single unit where info is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all of the drives will be the same all the time, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether info is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are created uses super fast SSD drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disk drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is an additional level of security for your data in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.