Data corruption is the damage of information because of various hardware or software fails. The moment a file is damaged, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file can 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 administrator, which makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to happen on larger hard drives where substantial volumes of information are placed. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated 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 drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often cannot locate corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one on the market that checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced immediately 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 duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website 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
If you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans, you will not have to worry about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system which keeps track of all files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between multiple NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any time. In comparison, all the other file systems execute checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the other disks as well and you may lose important info. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we can guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.