Data corruption is the damage of information due to various hardware or software failures. Once a file is damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as fails are more likely to occur on bigger hard disk drives where substantial volumes of info are stored. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and it'll be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems which run on web servers today often are unable to detect corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We've resolved the problem of silent data corruption on all our shared web hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one on the market that checks all the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly 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's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.