Data corruption is the damage of information due to various hardware or software failures. After a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work accurately, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive 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 occur on larger hard disk drives where considerable volumes of information are placed. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often cannot discover corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We have resolved the matter of silent data corruption on our shared web hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all of the files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You will not need to deal with any silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages because the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all of the files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file stored on a server. Because we store all content on a number of drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any possibility of the bad copy to be synchronized on the other drives. ZFS is the sole file system on the market which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems that are unable to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.