Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various hardware or software failures. After a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as fails are more likely to occur on larger in size hard drives where vast volumes of information are stored. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and it'll be copied on all drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers today often cannot identify corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one out there that checks all of the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced promptly 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 in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we store all content on numerous SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. In case there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens right away, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web servers or that it can be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following an unexpected power failure, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.