Data corruption is the damage of data due to various software or hardware failures. The moment a file is corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as fails are very likely to happen on larger hard drives where considerable volumes of info are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad 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 which run on web servers nowadays often are unable to detect corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our shared website hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all the files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced quickly 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 duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption because all of our storage servers work with the effective ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to verify the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be kept on several redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disks. All copies of a given file will feature the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, so if it detects a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's a sudden power loss, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform after some failure, prolonging the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.