Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and for that reason, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should since its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case such an issue appears and it's not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if 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 copied on all other drives and the damage will be long term. Numerous widespread file systems either don't offer real-time checks or do not have good ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

We have tackled the issue of silent data corruption on our cloud website hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one on the market that checks all files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares 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 is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You won't have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues if you buy one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans as the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all files are undamaged all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file saved on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the only file system out there that uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which cannot detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.