Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various software or hardware failures. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as fails are very likely to occur on bigger hard disks where vast volumes of info are located. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it will be duplicated on all drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers these days often are not able to find corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we make use of on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. In case a file on a drive becomes corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it is likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as other file systems do not include special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from a different disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens immediately, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever get damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we save 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 other drives and the one it has saved. When there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens instantly, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check following an unexpected blackout, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.