Data corruption is the damage of info because of various hardware or software problems. When a file is corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, 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 unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are more likely to occur on bigger hard drives where vast volumes of information are located. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and it will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often are unable to locate corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one on the market that checks all of the 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 NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced immediately with a good copy from another 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 NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.