Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and for that reason, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. When such a problem occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all the other drives and the harm will be long term. Many commonly used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We have resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all our web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all the files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we use 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 Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be shielded from silent data corruption since all our storage servers work with the reliable ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to ensure the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be saved on several redundant drives being employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disks. All copies of a given file will have the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies right away, so if it detects a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is a sudden 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 after some failure, prolonging the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the file system which can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.