Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software fails. Once a file is corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as failures are more likely to happen on larger in size hard drives where vast volumes of information are placed. When a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a good one and it'll be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often are unable to locate corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly 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 is replaced promptly 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 remaining NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You will not experience any silent data corruption issues whatsoever if you buy one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all of your files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file kept on a server. Since we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file has the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any probability of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the other hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you will find that uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.