Data corruption is the damage of information due to various software or hardware problems. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as problems are much more likely to happen on bigger hard disks where large volumes of info are located. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a regular one and it will be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are unable to recognize corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our shared web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one out there that checks all files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You will not have to deal with any silent data corruption issues in case you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions as the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all of the files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is assigned to each and every file stored on a server. As we store all content on a number of drives simultaneously, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the other drives. ZFS is the only file system available on the market that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which are not able to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.