Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer show a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. If such an issue appears and it isn't found by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the damage will be permanent. A large number of frequently used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on web hosting servers where huge volumes of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all of our web hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one on the market that checks all the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's 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 other NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you get one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you won't need to worry about silent file corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system which checks all files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done instantly, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, all the other file systems carry out checks after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you could lose crucial info. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.