Data corruption is the damage of information due to various software or hardware fails. When a file gets damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as fails are very likely to happen on larger in size hard drives where large volumes of info are placed. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be copied on all drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers today often cannot detect corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one in existence that checks all files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires plenty 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 powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.