Data corruption is the damage of data due to various software or hardware failures. After a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are much more likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where substantial volumes of information are stored. When a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and it will be duplicated on all the drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems that operate on web servers these days often are unable to identify corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

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

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on numerous SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In case there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a power loss and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.