Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and for that reason, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. When such a problem occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all the other drives and the damage will be long term. Many commonly used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on internet hosting servers where substantial volumes of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your websites in a cloud hosting account with our firm, you don't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All the data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMes. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't be corrupted. This may happen throughout the writing process on any drive and afterwards a corrupted copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives instantly and when a corrupted file is identified, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your data will remain undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its main advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we save all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check right after a sudden power failure, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.