Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software failures. When a file gets damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an application will not start or shall 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 information getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as problems are very likely to happen on larger hard disks where substantial volumes of info are located. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers these days often cannot detect corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting service providers, including our firm, use multiple HDDs to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive becomes corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it is very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as other file systems do not offer special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy shall be replaced with a good one from another hard drive. Due to the fact that this happens immediately, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. In case there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check right after an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.