Data corruption is the damage of info because of various hardware or software problems. After a file gets damaged, it will no longer function 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 unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are more likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where significant volumes of information are placed. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and it will be copied on all drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often are unable to recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all of the files right away by employing 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 constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we save all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. In case there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and in addition, even during a file system check right after an unexpected blackout, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.