Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become permanent. A large number of frequently used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all of our cloud hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on a number of SSD 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. When there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since it happens instantly, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with such checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden power loss, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after an electrical power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.