Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and because of this, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should as its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer show a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of an issue occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will be permanent. A large number of commonly used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
We have resolved the issue 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 out there which checks all files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We've avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. In case there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include such checks and what is more, even during a file system check right after a sudden power loss, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.