Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and due to this fact, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display 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, etcetera. In case this kind of a problem appears and it isn't identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all the other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of commonly used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on hosting servers where huge amounts of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all of our shared hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one in existence which checks all files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced promptly 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 duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be protected against silent data corruption because all our storage servers use the reliable ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to verify the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be saved on a couple of redundant drives being employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disk drives. All of the copies of a given file will feature the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies in real time, and if it discovers a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll swap that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is an unforeseen blackout, the data on the servers will not become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some failure, extending the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the only file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.