Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various software or hardware failures. After a file is damaged, it will no longer work accurately, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as failures are much more likely to happen on bigger hard disk drives where large volumes of information are located. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which operate on web servers these days often are not able to identify corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
In case you host your websites in a shared web hosting account with our firm, you don't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform employs the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All of the data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMe drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this type of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and if a corrupted file is identified, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your information will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages, you won't have to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system that keeps track of all the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, all of the other file systems execute checks after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the other drives as well and you could lose critical information. As this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to guarantee the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.