Data corruption is the damage of data due to various hardware or software failures. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on larger in size hard disk drives where substantial volumes of info are located. If a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a healthy one and it'll be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often are unable to locate corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
We've resolved the matter of silent data corruption on all of our cloud web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to carry out 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 websites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.