Data corruption is the damage of information because of various software or hardware problems. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work accurately, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive 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 administrator, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as failures are much more likely to happen on larger hard drives where significant volumes of info are stored. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a good one and it'll be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are not able to detect corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we store 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 saved. When there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens instantly, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following an unexpected power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.