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 malfunction, and due to this fact, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should because its bits shall 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 for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such a problem appears and it is not noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all the other drives and the damage will be long term. A large number of widespread file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all of our cloud web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced instantly 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 duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its basic advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens in real time, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following a sudden blackout, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.