Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and for that reason, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly as its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If this kind of an issue appears and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will become long term. A large number of widespread file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on web hosting servers where large amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our shared web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that 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 when any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away 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 remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory to perform 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 Servers

We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. When there's 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 corrupted copy can remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following a sudden electrical power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.