Data corruption is the damage of information due to various software or hardware problems. After a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as problems are more likely to occur on bigger hard disk drives where vast volumes of info are kept. When a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and will be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers today often are not able to identify corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one on the market that checks all the files immediately by using 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 regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use 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

You won't encounter any kind of silent data corruption issues should you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions because the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all of your files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is allotted to each and every file kept on a server. Since we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any possibility of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the other hard drives. ZFS is the only file system you can find that uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which cannot identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.