Data corruption is the damage of data because of various hardware or software problems. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where considerable volumes of information are placed. If a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and it will be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which run on web servers nowadays often are unable to identify corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

We have resolved the problem of silent data corruption on our website hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one in existence which checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case 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 bad file may remain or may be copied on the remaining SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you will not have to worry about silent file corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system which keeps track of all files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synchronized between multiple SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens right away, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, all the other file systems carry out checks only after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the other disks as well and you can lose crucial information. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.