Data corruption is the damage of information due to various hardware or software problems. The moment a file gets damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as fails are more likely to occur on larger hard disks where significant volumes of info are stored. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers today often are not able to discover corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all of our cloud web 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 that checks all files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ 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

If you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans, you won't have to be concerned about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - a high level file system which keeps track of all of the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between multiple SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done in real time, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, other file systems execute checks after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the other drives as well and you may lose crucial information. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.