The process of files getting damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems which hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more information is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find several fail-safes, yet often the data is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice anything. As a result, a bad file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. When a file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most widespread server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to identify some problem early enough or require a long time period in order to check all of the files and the server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all of our cloud hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be resistant to silent data corruption because all of our storage servers employ the efficient ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on several redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disk drives. All copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies right away, and if it finds a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it will swap that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is an unforeseen blackout, the data on the servers will not be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some failure, prolonging the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.