Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various software or hardware fails. When a file is corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely 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 admin, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to occur on larger hard drives where considerable volumes of info are stored. If a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and will be copied on all the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers today often cannot identify corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our shared website hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all of the files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each 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 corrupted, it's replaced right away 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 copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.