The process of files getting damaged owing to some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find several fail-safes, but often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see a thing. Consequently, a damaged file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. Once a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most well-known server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to identify a problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all of the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one in existence that checks all of the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the remaining SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be resistant to silent data corruption as all of our storage servers employ the reliable ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to guarantee the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be placed on a couple of redundant drives being employed in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all drives. All the copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, so if it identifies a mismatch, which will 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 is an unforeseen power failure, 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 malfunction, lengthening the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the sole file system which can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.