No Data Corruption & Data Integrity
Learn what ‘No Data Corruption & Data Integrity’ implies for the data in your website hosting account.
The process of files getting damaged due to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more info is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You will find different fail-safes, yet often the data is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect a thing. As a result, a damaged file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other disk drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. Once a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most commonly used server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a long amount of time in order to check all files and the web hosting server will not be operational for the time being.
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No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on our
shared hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.
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No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We've avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your
semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we store all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In case there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following an unexpected blackout, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.
