Data corruption is the damage of info because of various software or hardware fails. When a file gets damaged, it will no longer function accurately, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file can 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 damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, which makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on larger hard disks where significant volumes of info are kept. When a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and will be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers these days often cannot locate corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
If you host your sites in a website hosting account with our firm, you won't need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform works with the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All the information that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMes. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this type of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This could happen during the writing process on each drive and afterwards a corrupted copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives in real time and if a corrupted file is found, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your info will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens right away, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.