Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and consequently, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etcetera. When this kind of a problem appears and it is not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all other drives and the damage will be permanent. Many widely used file systems either don't offer 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 very common problem on web hosting servers where huge amounts of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most hosting service providers, including our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the exact same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive becomes damaged for reasons unknown, however, it is likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since alternative file systems don't have special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different hard drive. Since this happens immediately, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system known as 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. As we keep all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check after an unexpected blackout, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a power loss and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.