Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software failures. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function properly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully 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 acknowledgement by the system or an admin, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as fails are very likely to occur on bigger hard disks where substantial volumes of information are kept. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as an undamaged one and it'll be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often are unable to locate corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on 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 on the market that checks all files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its basic advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we keep all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since it happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following a sudden power loss, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.