Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software failures. After a file is damaged, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as failures are very likely to occur on bigger hard disk drives where large 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 a standard one and it'll be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which run on web servers today often cannot discover corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we make use of on our cloud platform. The majority of web hosting suppliers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, the exact same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive gets damaged for reasons unknown, yet, it's more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives because other file systems do not have special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy will be replaced with a good one from a different disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens immediately, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we save all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. When there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since it happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our servers or that it can be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this type of checks and what is more, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS won't crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.