Data corruption is the damage of data due to various software or hardware failures. When a file is damaged, it will no longer work correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where large volumes of info are stored. If a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the damaged file will be treated as a good one and it will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which run on web servers today often cannot identify corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites in a shared hosting account with our company, you do not need to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform uses the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMe drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This can occur throughout the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and if a corrupted file is found, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your information will continue to be intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we store all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. When there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens instantly, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.