Data corruption is the damage of information because of various software or hardware failures. After a file is corrupted, it will no longer work correctly, so an application will not start or will 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 information getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as failures are very likely to occur on larger hard drives where significant volumes of info are placed. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and it will be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers nowadays often cannot locate corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on our web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one on the market that checks all the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced immediately 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 NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be shielded from silent data corruption because all our storage servers employ the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be saved on several redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all disk drives. All the copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, and if it detects a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll swap that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some failure, lengthening the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.