Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software problems. Once a file is damaged, it will no longer work correctly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as failures are much more likely to occur on larger in size hard disk drives where large volumes of information are placed. If a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers nowadays often cannot detect corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've resolved the problem of silent data corruption on all of our web hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one in existence that checks all files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly 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 duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.