Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of information that often 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 work as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a true 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 the event that this kind of an issue appears and it isn't recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all other drives and the harm will become long term. Many widespread file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on hosting servers where huge amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files immediately 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 SSD drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system called ZFS. Its main advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. When there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include such checks and in addition, even during a file system check after an unexpected blackout, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS won't crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.