Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various software or hardware problems. Once a file is damaged, it will no longer work accurately, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file could 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 administrator, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as problems are more likely to happen on larger hard disks where vast volumes of information are located. When a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and will be copied on all the drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems which run on web servers these days often are not able to locate corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud website hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly 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 duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You won't have to deal with any silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages because the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to guarantee that all files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file saved on a server. Because we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the other hard drives. ZFS is the sole file system you can get which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are not able to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.