Data corruption is the damage of information because of various hardware or software failures. After a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as fails are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard disks where significant volumes of information are placed. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and it'll be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers these days often cannot detect corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud website hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all the files immediately 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 regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly 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 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 website hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages, you will not have to be concerned about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system which monitors all the files in real time. Every 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 a different drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, all the other file systems carry out checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you could lose precious information. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.