Data corruption is the damage of information because of various software or hardware failures. After a file is damaged, it will no longer function accurately, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to occur on larger hard disk drives where significant volumes of information are located. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and it'll be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which run on web servers nowadays often are unable to discover corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all files right away 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 SSD drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced instantly 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 SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.