Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various hardware or software problems. The moment a file is corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as fails are more likely to occur on larger hard disk drives where substantial volumes of information are kept. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad 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 that run on web servers nowadays often cannot find corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
If you host your websites in a hosting account from our firm, you do not need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform uses the outstanding ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All information that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many SSD drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this type of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't be corrupted. This can occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives live and in case a corrupted file is identified, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your information will stay intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you obtain one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you won't have to worry about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system which keeps track of all files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between several SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, other file systems perform checks only after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you can lose important info. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.