Data corruption is the damage of data because of various hardware or software fails. Once a file gets damaged, it will no longer work correctly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will 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 harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are very likely to happen on larger hard disk drives where significant volumes of information are located. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and will be copied on all drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers these days often are unable to discover 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 Shared Hosting

We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one in existence that checks all files immediately 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 SSD drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the other SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud 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 Hosting

You won't experience any silent data corruption issues in case you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages because the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all the files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is assigned to each and every file saved on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any chance of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the rest of the drives. ZFS is the sole file system you can find that uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems that are not able to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.