Data corruption is the damage of information because of various hardware or software fails. After a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive 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 administrator, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on larger hard disks where considerable volumes of info are located. When a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and it will be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which run on web servers these days often are not able to discover corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. The majority of internet hosting service providers, like our company, use multiple HDDs to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, however, it is likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as other file systems don't offer special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy shall be replaced with a good one from another drive. Because this happens instantly, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we save all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with such checks and what's more, even during a file system check following an unexpected power loss, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.