Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer present an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. In the event that this kind of a problem appears and it's not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all other drives and the harm will become long term. Many popular file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
We have tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all our website hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we store all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. In case there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our website hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check following an unexpected power loss, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.