Data corruption is the damage of data because of various hardware or software failures. Once a file is corrupted, it will no longer work accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as failures are more likely to happen on bigger hard disks where significant volumes of information are kept. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which run on web servers these days often cannot detect corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
In case you host your websites in a website hosting account with our company, you do not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform works with the outstanding ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMe drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't be corrupted. This can occur throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives in real time and in case a corrupted file is located, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your information will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We've avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. When there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check after a sudden power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a power loss and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.