Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software problems. When a file is damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard drives where large volumes of information are placed. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and it will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that operate on web servers today often cannot recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new web hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we make use of on our cloud platform. Most hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for some reason, yet, it's very likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as other file systems do not feature special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different hard disk. As this happens instantly, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption since all our storage servers work with the efficient ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to guarantee the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on a couple of redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all drives. All of the copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, and if it identifies a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll swap that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is an unforeseen blackout, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some failure, extending the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.