Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and as a consequence, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. 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 for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etcetera. When such a problem occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. A number of frequently used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on web hosting servers where large volumes of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We've resolved the matter of silent data corruption on all our hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one out there that checks all the files instantly 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 frequently 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 is replaced promptly with a good copy from another 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 a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be shielded from silent data corruption because all of our storage servers use the effective ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to verify the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on several redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same across all drives. All copies of a particular file will feature the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies quickly, and if it identifies a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's an unforeseen power loss, the data on the servers won't get corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform after some failure, lengthening the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.