Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and consequently, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such an issue occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all other drives and the damage will become long term. Numerous widely used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on web hosting servers where huge volumes of information are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our shared web hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files in real time by using 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 synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced immediately 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 rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its main advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we save all content on multiple 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 stored. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because this happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and what is more, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.