Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and consequently, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer present an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. In case such an issue appears and it is not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all of the other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of widespread file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on web hosting servers where huge amounts of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our shared website hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we keep all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and in addition, even during a file system check right after an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.