Data corruption is the damage of data due to various software or hardware fails. After a file is corrupted, it will no longer work correctly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file could be partially or completely 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, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as fails are more likely to happen on larger in size hard disks where large volumes of information are located. If a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it'll be duplicated on all drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often are not able to recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one on the market that checks all of the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its main advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint which 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 matches the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. In case there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web servers or that it could be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems use such checks and what's more, even during a file system check following an unexpected blackout, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.