Data corruption is the damage of data because of various hardware or software problems. After a file is corrupted, it will no longer function properly, 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 then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as problems are very likely to happen on bigger hard disks where vast volumes of information are kept. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and it'll be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers these days often cannot identify corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all the files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of 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

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be protected against silent data corruption as all of our storage servers work with the efficient ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to verify the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on a couple of redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disk drives. All the copies of a particular file will feature the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates quickly, and if it registers a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, extending the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the only file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.