Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various hardware or software failures. Once a file is damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall 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 identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as problems are more likely to happen on bigger hard disk drives where large volumes of information are kept. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers today often are not able to identify corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We've resolved the problem of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced promptly 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 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 use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be resistant to silent data corruption as all our storage servers use the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to ensure the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all drives. All of the copies of a particular file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies right away, and if it identifies a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will replace that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is a sudden power loss, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some failure, lengthening the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.