Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and due to this fact, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly because 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 for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. In case this kind of a problem occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Numerous widespread file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on internet hosting servers where large amounts of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all our shared web hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there that checks all files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be shielded from silent data corruption because all our storage servers employ the efficient ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to ensure the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be saved on several redundant drives operating in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disk drives. All copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, and if it detects a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll substitute that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is a sudden blackout, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform following some breakdown, lengthening the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the sole file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.