Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and due to this fact, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly as its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such an issue appears and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all of the other drives and the damage will be permanent. A large number of frequently used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or do not 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 substantial volumes of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our cloud web hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all the files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple 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 Servers

We've avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we keep all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens instantly, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use such checks and what is more, even during a file system check right after a sudden power loss, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.