Data corruption is the damage of data due to various software or hardware problems. When a file gets damaged, 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 file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are more likely to happen on larger hard disks where large volumes of information are located. When a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and will be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often cannot discover corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on our web hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced instantly 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 rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.