Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lost. 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. When such an issue appears and it isn't identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all other drives and the damage will become permanent. Numerous frequently used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a hosting account with our company, you won't need to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform uses the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All info 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 this type of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This can occur throughout the writing process on each drive and afterwards a corrupted copy can be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives in real time and in case a corrupted file is found, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your information will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be resistant to silent data corruption because all our storage servers make use of the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to verify the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on a couple of redundant drives being employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disks. All the copies of a specific file will feature the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates quickly, and if it finds a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll swap that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unexpected blackout, the data on the servers will not be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some failure, lengthening the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the only file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.