Data corruption is the damage of information caused by 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 shall 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 harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as problems are much more likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where considerable volumes of information are located. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and it will be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers today often are unable to recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our web hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files instantly 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 frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs 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 work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.