Data corruption is the damage of info because of various hardware or software fails. After a file is corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file could be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on bigger hard disk drives where significant volumes of information are stored. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers today often cannot discover corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple HDDs to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive is damaged for some reason, yet, it is more than likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because alternative file systems do not have special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the bad copy shall be swapped with a good one from another hard disk. Because this happens immediately, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. In the event that there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check after a sudden electrical power failure, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.