Data corruption is the damage of data due to various hardware or software fails. When a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file shall 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 admin, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are very likely to happen on larger hard disk drives where large volumes of info are stored. If a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers today often cannot detect corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each 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 when any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the other SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You will not need to deal with any silent data corruption issues in case you get one of our semi-dedicated server solutions due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all of your files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file kept on a server. As we store all content on a number of drives simultaneously, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the other hard drives. ZFS is the only file system on the market which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.