Data corruption is the damage of information because of various software or hardware fails. When a file gets damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as failures are more likely to happen on larger hard disks where vast volumes of information are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it will be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems that operate on web servers these days often are not able to locate corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all of our cloud web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there that checks all the files in real time by employing 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 constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption because all our storage servers use the advanced ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to guarantee the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on a couple of redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disks. All copies of a given file will feature the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies right away, so if it discovers a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll swap that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is a sudden power failure, the data on the servers will not be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some malfunction, lengthening the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the only file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.