Data corruption is the damage of info because of various hardware or software fails. When a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully 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 administrator, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger hard drives where substantial volumes of information are located. When a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers these days often are unable to identify corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all of our shared hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files instantly by employing 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 continually 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 instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very 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
We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its basic advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we save 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 saved. In case there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include such checks and what's more, even during a file system check after an unexpected blackout, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power loss and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.