Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various software or hardware fails. The moment a file gets damaged, it will no longer work accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as fails are very likely to happen on larger in size hard disk drives where substantial volumes of info are kept. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers these days often are unable to locate corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all of our web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all files right away 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 frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.