Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work properly since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that such a problem occurs and it is not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all the other drives and the damage will become long term. Numerous widespread file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on web hosting servers where large amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all of our cloud hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one on the market that checks all files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data 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 as all of our storage servers work with the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to guarantee the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on a couple of redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all drives. All copies of a given file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, so if it detects a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unexpected blackout, the data on the servers won't get corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, lengthening the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the sole file system which can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.