Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should since its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer display a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. In the event that 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 in case this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all other drives and the harm will become permanent. A large number of frequently used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on hosting servers where large volumes of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a cloud hosting account with our company, you won't need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform employs the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMes. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with such a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This may occur throughout the writing process on any drive and afterwards a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives instantly and when a corrupted file is identified, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your info will stay intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its main advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we save all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check after a sudden power loss, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.