Data corruption is the damage of info because of various hardware or software fails. After a file is corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file 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 website hosting servers as problems are more likely to happen on larger hard drives where large volumes of information are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and it will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers today often are unable to identify corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have resolved the problem of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines 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 corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use 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 Hosting

In case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you will not need to worry about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - a high level file system that keeps track of all the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between a number of SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done immediately, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, all of the other file systems perform checks only after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you could lose critical information. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.