Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various software or hardware failures. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then 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 significant problem for hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where significant volumes of info are placed. When a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and it will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers today often are unable to locate corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your info 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 as all our storage servers use the reliable ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to verify the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on a couple of redundant drives operating in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all drives. All the copies of a specific file will feature the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, so if it discovers a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it will swap that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's an unforeseen power loss, the data on the servers won't get corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some failure, extending the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the sole file system which can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.