Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software problems. After a file is damaged, it will no longer work as it should, so an app 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 data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are very likely to occur on bigger hard disks where significant volumes of information are placed. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and will be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often are unable to detect corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
In case you host your websites in a web hosting account from our firm, you won't have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform works with the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All of the information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this kind of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on each drive and after that a bad copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all drives in real time and in the event that a corrupted file is identified, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your info will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its main advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we keep all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. If there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following an unexpected power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.