Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software problems. When a file is damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an app 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 damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as failures are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard disks where large volumes of information are placed. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and it will be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers these days often are not able to identify corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
We have resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all our website hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single 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 examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced promptly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We have avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system named ZFS. Its main advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of 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 stored. In case there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after a sudden power loss, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.