Data corruption is the damage of info due to various hardware or software failures. The moment a file gets damaged, it will no longer work as it should, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file will 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 admin, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on bigger hard disk drives where significant volumes of info are kept. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and it will be duplicated on all 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 discover corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all the files right away by using 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 frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the other SSDs. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be shielded from silent data corruption since all our storage servers employ the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to ensure the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on a couple of redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disk drives. All of the copies of a given file will feature the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, and if it discovers a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unforeseen blackout, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some failure, lengthening the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.