Data corruption is the damage of information due to various software or hardware problems. The moment a file gets damaged, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are very likely to happen on bigger hard disk drives where substantial volumes of information are stored. When a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as a good one and it will be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers these days often cannot detect corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting
We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our cloud website hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files immediately 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 constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.