Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various hardware or software fails. Once a file is corrupted, it will no longer function properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file could 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 identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as fails are very likely to occur on larger hard disks where vast volumes of info are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often are not able to recognize corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting suppliers, including our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same info is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive becomes damaged for whatever reason, yet, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives because alternative file systems do not include special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy will be replaced with a good one from a different disk drive. Since this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We've avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we keep all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other hard drives 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 failure, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.