Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various software or hardware fails. When a file gets damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as failures are more likely to happen on larger in size hard disks where vast volumes of info are placed. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged 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 nowadays often cannot find corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all our shared website hosting servers by using the cutting-edge 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 instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and if 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 duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we save all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. When there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens instantly, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and what is more, even during a file system check following a sudden electrical power failure, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.