Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software failures. After a file is corrupted, it will no longer work correctly, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or completely 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 identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger hard drives where large volumes of info are stored. When a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a good one and it will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which run on web servers today often are unable to locate 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 Shared Hosting

We have tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one out there that checks all the files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include such checks and what is more, even during a file system check right after a sudden blackout, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.