Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the losing of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work properly because its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer show an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such a problem appears and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the damage will become long term. Numerous frequently used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a cloud hosting account with our company, you don't have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform works with the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All of the information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this type of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This could occur during the writing process on each drive and afterwards a damaged copy can be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives live and when a corrupted file is found, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your info will stay intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. If there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens in real time, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after a sudden power failure, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.