Data corruption is the damage of information due to various software or hardware failures. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are more likely to happen on larger in size hard disk drives where substantial volumes of information are located. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a good one and it will be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers these days often cannot identify corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

In case you host your websites in a shared hosting account from our firm, you won't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform employs the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All of the data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many SSD drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this kind of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on any drive and then a bad copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and when a corrupted file is identified, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your info will remain unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system named ZFS. Its basic advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after an unexpected power failure, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.