Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software failures. When a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work properly, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open 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 website hosting servers as fails are very likely to happen on bigger hard disks where substantial volumes of info are located. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a healthy one and it'll be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which operate on web servers today often are not able to detect corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one on the market that checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with 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. Since we keep 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 saved. If there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens instantly, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and in addition, even during a file system check after a sudden power loss, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS won't crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.