Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as just a single unit where your information is kept. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives is the same at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also better as the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may differ depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
All the content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web 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 guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.