Data corruption is the damage of data due to various software or hardware failures. The moment a file is corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as failures are much more likely to occur on larger hard disk drives where significant volumes of info are located. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which run on web servers nowadays often cannot recognize corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a web hosting account with our company, you don't have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform employs the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All of the data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple SSDs. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this type of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This may happen during the writing process on each drive and afterwards a bad copy may be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives instantly and when a corrupted file is found, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your info will stay intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you will not need to be concerned about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system which monitors all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between several SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and when 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, all the other file systems execute checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the remaining drives as well and you may lose precious info. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we can guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.