Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various software or hardware problems. When a file is corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are more likely to happen on larger in size hard disk drives where vast volumes of info are placed. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often cannot discover corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We have tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our shared hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system called 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. As we save all content on numerous SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. If there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and what is more, even during a file system check right after a sudden blackout, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.