Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer display a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such an issue appears and it's not found by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all of the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Many widely used file systems either don't have 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 very common problem on hosting servers where huge volumes of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our shared web hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one on the market that checks all the files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you will not have to be concerned about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system that keeps track of all files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synchronized between a couple of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done right away, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, alternative file systems perform checks after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the other drives as well and you may lose critical information. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.