Data corruption is the damage of information because of various software or hardware problems. Once a file is corrupted, it will no longer work properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as failures are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard drives where large volumes of info are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a good one and it'll be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often cannot detect corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. Most internet hosting providers, including our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the same data is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, however, it is very likely that it will be copied on the other drives since other file systems don't include special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from a different hard disk drive. As this happens right away, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system named ZFS. Its basic advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In case there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because it happens instantly, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web servers or that it could be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden power loss, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.