Data corruption is the damage of info due to various software or hardware problems. The moment a file is corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as failures are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard disk drives where vast volumes of info are placed. If a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems which 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 working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all files in real time 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 frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced instantly 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 copied on the other SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we store all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after a sudden power failure, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.