Data corruption is the damage of data because of various software or hardware problems. The moment a file gets damaged, it will no longer function correctly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive 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, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where significant volumes of information are located. If a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and it will be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers these days often cannot locate corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

We have resolved the matter of silent data corruption on our shared web hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced immediately 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 plenty of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we keep all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. If there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard disks 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 power loss, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a power loss and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.