Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work properly because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer present an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such a problem appears and it isn't recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become long term. A large number of popular file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have good ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away 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 duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You won't need to deal with any silent data corruption issues whatsoever if you purchase one of our semi-dedicated server solutions since the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all of the files are undamaged all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file saved on a server. Because we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the remaining drives. ZFS is the sole file system on the market that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are not able to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.