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 properly, so an app 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 then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on larger hard drives where significant volumes of information are placed. When a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and it will be duplicated on all drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers today often are not able to find corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, identical info is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for whatever reason, yet, it is more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives since other file systems do not offer special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum won't 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 hard disk drive. Because this happens instantly, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system named ZFS. Its basic advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we keep all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. When there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens instantly, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and what is more, even during a file system check after an unexpected power loss, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.