Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and as a consequence, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that this kind of a problem 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 drive that's part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. Many commonly used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on web hosting servers where huge amounts of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a cloud hosting account from our firm, you will not need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform employs the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any kind of information that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMe drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This could happen throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all of the drives instantly and in case a corrupted file is identified, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your info will stay unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

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 employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because this happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after a sudden power loss, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.