Data corruption is the damage of info because of various software or hardware fails. When a file gets damaged, it will no longer work correctly, 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 and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are very likely to happen on larger hard drives where substantial volumes of information are placed. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and it'll be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often cannot find corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all of our shared website hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all of the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires 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 use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You won't encounter any kind of silent data corruption issues if you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server solutions due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file stored on a server. Because we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard drives. ZFS is the only file system out there which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.