Data corruption is the damage of data due to various hardware or software problems. When a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as failures are more likely to happen on larger hard disks where vast volumes of info are placed. If a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as a good one and it will be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers today often are not able to detect corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our cloud website hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all of the files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.