Data corruption is the damage of info due to various hardware or software failures. When a file is damaged, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as fails are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard disk drives where considerable volumes of information are located. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and it will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers today often cannot identify corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. The vast majority of hosting service providers, like our company, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, the same data is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, yet, it is likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because alternative file systems do not have special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the bad copy shall be substituted with a good one from another hard disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens immediately, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be resistant to silent data corruption as all our storage servers use the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be saved on a couple of redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same across all drives. All the copies of a particular file will feature the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, so if it registers a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will swap that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unexpected power loss, the data on the servers will not be corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform following some failure, lengthening the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the only file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.