Data corruption is the damage of info due to various software or hardware problems. After a file is corrupted, it will no longer work accurately, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as fails are more likely to occur on larger hard disks where substantial volumes of information are located. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the bad file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers these days often cannot recognize corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all of the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple very 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 probability of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we save all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens instantly, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include such checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after a sudden power loss, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.