Data corruption is the damage of info because of various hardware or software fails. The moment a file is corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or fully unreadable, an archive 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, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger in size hard disk drives where significant volumes of info are stored. If a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and will be copied on all drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are not able to detect corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on our web hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that 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 corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple 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

We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we save 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 saved. In the event that there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because this happens instantly, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can 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 work with such checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after a sudden power loss, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a power loss and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.