Data corruption is the damage of data because of various hardware or software problems. When a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as failures are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard disk drives where vast volumes of info are kept. When a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and will be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers these days often cannot recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption because all our storage servers make use of the effective ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to ensure the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all disks. All copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, so if it detects a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is an unexpected power loss, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some failure, prolonging the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.