Data corruption is the damage of information because of various hardware or software problems. When a file is corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as failures are much more likely to occur on bigger hard disk drives where considerable volumes of info are located. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and it'll be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers today often are not able to recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
If you host your websites in a shared web hosting account from our company, you will not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any kind of information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this type of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This may happen during the writing process on each drive and afterwards a corrupted copy can be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all the drives right away and if a corrupted file is located, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your info will stay intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its main advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. In case there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and in addition, even during a file system check after an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.