Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should because its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that this kind of an issue appears and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all other drives and the damage will become long term. Many commonly used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on web hosting servers where large amounts of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

In case you host your websites in a shared hosting account from our firm, you will not have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform employs the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMes. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this type of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This could happen during the writing process on any drive and then a bad copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives right away and if a corrupted file is found, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your data will remain undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You will not need to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues if you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server plans because the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to guarantee that all of the files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file kept on a server. Because we store all content on a number of drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any possibility of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard disks. ZFS is the sole file system you will find which uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems that cannot detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.