Data corruption is the damage of information because of various software or hardware problems. Once a file gets damaged, it will no longer work accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as failures are more likely to happen on larger in size hard drives where large volumes of info are placed. When a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a good one and it'll be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers today often cannot find corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all of our cloud web hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages, you won't have to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system which keeps track of all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between a number of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done in real time, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, other file systems carry out checks after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you may lose precious info. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.