Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various software or hardware failures. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on larger hard disk drives where significant volumes of information are located. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be copied on all drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often cannot locate corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all of our hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in case 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 copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you will not have to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all of the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synced between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done right away, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, all of the other file systems execute checks only after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you could lose important information. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we can guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.