Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function properly since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. If this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all of the other drives and the harm will be long term. A number of frequently used file systems either do not have 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 very common matter on web hosting servers where huge amounts of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our cloud web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all of the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any possibility of files getting damaged 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 each and every file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since 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 other drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the bad 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 corrupted copy can remain on our servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after a sudden electrical power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.