Data corruption is the damage of information due to various software or hardware problems. After a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as problems are much more likely to occur on larger in size hard disks where vast volumes of info are placed. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the damaged file will be treated as a healthy one and it will be duplicated on all drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers nowadays often are not able to find corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your sites in a cloud hosting account with our firm, you don't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All the data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many SSD drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on any drive and then a damaged copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and when a corrupted file is identified, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your data will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining 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 it happens right away, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and in addition, even during a file system check right after a sudden blackout, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.