Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer show a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. If this kind of an issue appears and it is not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become permanent. Numerous widespread file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

In case you host your sites in a website hosting account from our company, you don't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform works with the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMe drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This could occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and afterwards a corrupted copy can be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives right away and in the event that a corrupted file is discovered, 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

We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we store all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether 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 is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check after a sudden power loss, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.