Data corruption is the damage of data because of various software or hardware fails. Once a file gets damaged, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file could be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as fails are more likely to happen on bigger hard drives where significant volumes of info are kept. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the bad file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often cannot recognize corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the hi-tech 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 the files right away 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 constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced quickly 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 execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ 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

We have avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system named ZFS. Its main 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 store all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. When there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check right after an unexpected power failure, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.