Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the losing of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. When this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't found by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Numerous widely used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a cloud hosting account with our company, you will not have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform works with the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMes. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this type of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This can occur during the writing process on any drive and afterwards a corrupted copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and when a corrupted file is identified, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your data will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative 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 whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. In case there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check following an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.