Data corruption is the damage of information because of various software or hardware failures. The moment a file is corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or completely 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 admin, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to occur on larger hard disk drives where considerable volumes of info are placed. When a drive is a 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 will be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers these days often are not able to recognize corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our website hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines 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 is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you get one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you won't need to be concerned about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all of the files in real time. Whenever 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 synchronized between several 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 in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done in real time, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any time. In comparison, all the other file systems execute checks after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you could lose critical data. As this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.