RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard drives which function together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. In either case, the very same info is stored on all of the drives and the main benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created employs quick SSD drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disks function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that practically nothing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is another level of security for your info in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.