Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various software or hardware failures. When a file is corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are more likely to happen on larger hard drives where significant volumes of info are located. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it'll be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are unable to locate corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one on the market that checks all of the 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 will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. In the event that there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ such checks and in addition, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.