Data corruption is the damage of info due to various hardware or software fails. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file could be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as failures are more likely to occur on larger hard disks where large volumes of info are placed. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and it'll be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers today often are not able to recognize corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new website hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The majority of internet hosting providers, including our company, use multiple HDDs to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive is damaged for whatever reason, however, it's likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as alternative file systems do not include special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different drive. As this happens immediately, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and in addition, even during a file system check after an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.