Data corruption is the damage of info due to various software or hardware fails. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file could be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard disk drives where considerable volumes of info are placed. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and it'll be duplicated on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems which run on web servers today often are not able to find corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one on the market that checks all of the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced promptly 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 duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of 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
In case you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't need to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system that checks all the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done immediately, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, alternative file systems execute checks only after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you could lose precious info. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.