Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various software or hardware fails. After a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to happen on larger hard disk drives where large volumes of information are located. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as an undamaged one and it will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are unable to find corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all of the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.