Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and as a consequence, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should because its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer present an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If this kind of an issue appears and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the harm will become permanent. A large number of widely used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on hosting servers where large amounts of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your websites in a cloud hosting account with our firm, you don't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform works with the amazing ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMes. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with such a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This can occur during the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all the drives right away and when a corrupted file is identified, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your info will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. In case there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since it happens right away, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check after an unexpected power failure, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.