Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function properly as its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case such a problem appears and it isn't identified by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. A number of commonly used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on web hosting servers where huge volumes of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your sites in a cloud hosting account from our firm, you do not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform works with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMes. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This can occur throughout the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives immediately and if a corrupted file is identified, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. In this way, your data will stay intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be resistant to silent data corruption because all of our storage servers make use of the advanced ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to guarantee the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disk drives. All the copies of a particular file will feature the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, so if it detects a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will swap that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is a sudden blackout, the data on the servers will not become corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some malfunction, lengthening the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.