Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, and so on. In the event that such an issue appears and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of frequently used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced right away with a good copy from some other 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 NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its main advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we store all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. In the event that there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted 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 furthermore, even during a file system check after an unexpected power failure, none of them will discover 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 unnecessary.