Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In case this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't found by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. Numerous frequently used file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where large amounts of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all our web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one on the market that checks all files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away 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 rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your info 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 due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its basic advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every 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 rest of the drives and the one it has saved. If there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a power loss and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.