Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software fails. When a file is damaged, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as fails are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard disk drives where large volumes of information are located. 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 damaged file will be treated as a regular one and it will be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers nowadays often are not able to recognize corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all of our cloud hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its main advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we save all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.