Data corruption is the damage of info due to various software or hardware failures. After a file is corrupted, it will no longer work correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as problems are much more likely to happen on bigger hard disk drives where vast volumes of info are kept. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the bad file will be treated as a regular one and will be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems which run on web servers these days often cannot discover corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our website hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all the files right away 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 constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, 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 requires plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your info 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 as all our storage servers use the advanced ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to verify the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be saved on a couple of redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all drives. All the copies of a specific file will feature the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies quickly, so if it registers a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it will substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's a sudden blackout, the data on the servers will not become corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform following some breakdown, prolonging the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.