Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software fails. When a file is damaged, it will no longer function correctly, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard disks where considerable volumes of information are kept. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as a good one and will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often are unable to discover corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all of our hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires lots 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 powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be protected against silent data corruption because all of our storage servers make use of the efficient ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to ensure the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on several redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disks. All the copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies in real time, and if it discovers a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it will replace that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unforeseen blackout, the data on the servers will not be corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some failure, lengthening the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the only file system which can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.