Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software problems. After a file is damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any acknowledgement 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 in size hard disks where considerable volumes of info are stored. If a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and it will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers these days often cannot recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all of our shared hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each 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 compares 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 corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be shielded from silent data corruption because all our storage servers use the advanced ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to ensure the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on a couple of redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same across all drives. All of the copies of a particular file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates quickly, and if it discovers a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is an unforeseen blackout, the data on the servers will not get corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, extending 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.