Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software problems. The moment a file gets damaged, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on larger hard disk drives where considerable volumes of info are located. When a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a healthy one and it'll be duplicated on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems that operate on web servers nowadays often cannot detect corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared website hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and considering that 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 damaged for whatever reason, yet, it is likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because other file systems do not include special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different hard disk. Due to the fact that this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its main advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we save all content on numerous NVMe 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 saved. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens instantly, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ such checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden blackout, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS won't crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.