Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various hardware or software problems. After a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as fails are very likely to happen on larger hard disk drives where considerable volumes of info are located. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and will be copied on all the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers these days often are unable to find corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting
We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our cloud website 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 in existence that checks all of the files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of 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 resistant to silent data corruption as all of our storage servers use the effective ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on several redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all drives. All the copies of a particular file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies in real time, and if it finds a mismatch, that would 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's an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform following some malfunction, lengthening the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.