Data corruption is the damage of info because of various hardware or software failures. The moment a file gets damaged, it will no longer function correctly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to happen on larger hard disk drives where substantial volumes of info are placed. When a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a healthy one and it will be duplicated on all drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers today often are unable to find corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all our hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If 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 risk of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other 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 since it happens instantly, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check right after an unexpected power loss, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.