Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various software or hardware problems. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file 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, which makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as fails are very likely to occur on bigger hard disks where vast volumes of info are placed. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is copied 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 drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers these days often are not able to find corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a hosting account from our firm, you won't need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform employs the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of NVMes. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this type of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This can happen at the time of the writing process on each drive and afterwards a bad copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives live and if a corrupted file is found, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your info will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In case there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and what is more, even during a file system check after an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.