Data corruption is the damage of data due to various software or hardware failures. When a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are more likely to happen on larger hard disks where vast volumes of information are located. When a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as a regular one and will be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers nowadays often are unable to recognize corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We have resolved the matter of silent data corruption on all of our shared website hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one in existence which checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.