Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the losing of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and due to this fact, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer display an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of an issue occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all of the other drives and the harm will become permanent. A large number of widely used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on internet hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our website hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one in existence that checks all the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ 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 Servers

We've avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we save all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether 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 bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could 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 use this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check right after an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.