Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software problems. When a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as failures are very likely to happen on larger hard disks where large volumes of information are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers today often are unable to recognize corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

If you host your websites in a cloud hosting account from our firm, you don't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform employs the amazing ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any kind of info that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of SSD drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This can happen during the writing process on each drive and then a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives right away and in the event that a corrupted file is discovered, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your info will stay intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we store all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after an unexpected blackout, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.