Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software problems. Once 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 will 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 significant problem for hosting servers as failures are very likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where substantial volumes of information are located. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a good one and it'll be duplicated on all the drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are not able to locate corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one out there that checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the other SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you get one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you won't have to be concerned about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system that monitors all the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synced between several SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and if it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done immediately, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. In comparison, alternative file systems perform checks after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you could lose important information. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.