Data corruption is the damage of info due to various hardware or software fails. The moment a file gets damaged, it will no longer function properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as fails are more likely to happen on larger in size hard drives where large volumes of information are kept. 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 an undamaged one and it will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often are unable to detect 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 Website Hosting

We have resolved the problem of silent data corruption on all of our shared website hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away 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 duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you get one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you won't need to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system which monitors all of the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between multiple SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and when it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens right away, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, alternative file systems carry out checks only after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you can lose critical data. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.