Data corruption is the damage of info because of various hardware or software problems. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as problems are more likely to occur on larger hard disks where substantial volumes of info are placed. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a good one and will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers today often cannot discover corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our shared web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you go for one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you will not have to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system which checks all files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synchronized between a number of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and if it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done immediately, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, other file systems carry out checks after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you may lose critical data. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.