Data corruption is the damage of information due to various hardware or software problems. 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 shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file 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 administrator, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as failures are very likely to happen on larger hard disks where large volumes of info are kept. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often are not able to find corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced instantly 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 other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.