Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software failures. After a file gets damaged, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file could be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as problems are more likely to occur on larger in size hard disk drives where substantial volumes of information are placed. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the damaged file will be treated as a healthy one and it will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are unable to recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all of our hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced immediately 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 lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.