Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software fails. When a file is corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as fails are very likely to happen on bigger hard drives where significant volumes of info are placed. When a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and it will be copied on all the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers today often cannot identify corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on our cloud website hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all the files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and when 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 bad file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ such checks and in addition, even during a file system check right after an unexpected blackout, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.