Data corruption is the damage of information because of various hardware or software problems. After a file is damaged, it will no longer work properly, 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 data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as failures are more likely to happen on larger hard disk drives where vast volumes of info are located. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often cannot identify corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on our web hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced instantly 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 duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You will not encounter any silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file stored on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any probability of the bad copy to be synchronized on the other drives. ZFS is the only file system you will find which uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which are unable to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.