Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly as its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer show a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that this kind of a problem appears and it's not found by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all the other drives and the harm will be permanent. Many frequently used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on internet hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

We've dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all of our website hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all of the files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced instantly 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 copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. In case there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a good 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 hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems use such checks and what's more, even during a file system check following an unexpected power loss, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.