Data corruption is the damage of info due to various software or hardware failures. After a file is corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an application 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 harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as failures are very likely to happen on bigger hard disk drives where large volumes of info are placed. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are unable to identify corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple HDDs to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same info is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive becomes corrupted for some reason, yet, it is more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because alternative file systems do not feature special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS applies 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 will be swapped with a good one from a different hard disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens instantly, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over 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 keep all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because it happens right away, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include such checks and what is more, even during a file system check following an unexpected blackout, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.