Data corruption is the damage of info because of various software or hardware problems. Once a file is corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and 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 website hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where large volumes of information are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often cannot recognize corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
In case you host your sites in a website hosting account with our firm, you do not need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform uses the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMes. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this type of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This can occur during the writing process on any drive and afterwards a bad copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives immediately and in case a corrupted file is located, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your data will stay unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't have to worry about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - a high level file system which checks all of the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between a couple of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all 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 in real time, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, alternative file systems perform checks after a system malfunction, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you could lose critical information. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.