Data corruption is the damage of data because of various software or hardware problems. When a file is damaged, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely 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 admin, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as problems are more likely to occur on bigger hard drives where vast volumes of information are kept. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and it'll be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which run on web servers these days often are unable to recognize corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all of our cloud website hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web servers or that it can be duplicated 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 after a sudden blackout, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.