Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the losing of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and due to this fact, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly since its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of an issue appears and it is not found by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all other drives and the harm will become long term. Numerous frequently used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on hosting servers where substantial volumes of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

In case you host your sites in a web hosting account from our company, you will not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform uses the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All the info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMe drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this type of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This may occur throughout the writing process on any drive and then a corrupted copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives instantly and in the event that a corrupted file is identified, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your information will remain intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its basic advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we save all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. In case there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since it happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check after a sudden electrical power failure, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.