Data corruption is the damage of info due to various hardware or software problems. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as failures are much more likely to occur on larger hard drives where considerable volumes of info are kept. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often are not able to find corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single 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 examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, 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 bad file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We've avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we store all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. In the event that there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems use such checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following an unexpected power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.