Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various software or hardware failures. Once a file is damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as problems are very likely to happen on bigger hard disks where considerable volumes of info are placed. When a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are not able to locate corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all of our shared website hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as 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 SSD drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced promptly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.