Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the loss of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and for that reason, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function properly since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such an issue occurs and it's not 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 a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Many popular file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on internet hosting servers where substantial volumes of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have resolved the problem of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one on the market that checks all files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly 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 copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you get one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you won't need to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system which monitors all of the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synced between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done right away, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, other file systems perform checks after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the remaining drives as well and you could lose precious information. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we can guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.