Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various software or hardware failures. Once a file is corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open 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 problems are very likely to happen on larger in size hard drives where vast volumes of information are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often are not able to recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your websites in a cloud hosting account with our firm, you do not have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform uses the reliable ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any info that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMe drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this type of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on each drive and then a bad copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all drives right away and in case a corrupted file is found, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. In this way, your info will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting 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. Since we save all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens in real time, 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 use such checks and in addition, even during a file system check following an unexpected blackout, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS won't crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.