Data corruption is the damage of data because of various software or hardware problems. Once a file gets damaged, it will no longer function properly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are more likely to occur on larger in size hard drives where large volumes of information are kept. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it will be copied on all drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often are unable to find corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting
We have tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our cloud website hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you won't need to be concerned about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system which keeps track of all the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between a couple of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens in real time, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, other file systems execute checks only after a system malfunction, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the remaining drives as well and you could lose crucial information. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.