Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and due to this fact, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer show a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. When this kind of a problem occurs and it isn't identified by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all other drives and the harm will become permanent. Many widespread file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

We have tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all our cloud web hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You won't have to deal with any silent data corruption issues should you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages because the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to guarantee that all files are undamaged all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file stored on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the bad copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard disks. ZFS is the only file system on the market which uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which are unable to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.