Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the losing of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, and so on. In the event that this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all the other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of widely used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on hosting servers where substantial volumes of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your sites in a cloud hosting account with our firm, you will not need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform uses the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMes. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on any drive and afterwards a bad copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives right away and when a corrupted file is discovered, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your data will stay undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be resistant to silent data corruption because all our storage servers work with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to ensure the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on a couple of redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all drives. All the copies of a given file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, so if it registers a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll substitute that file with a good copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's a sudden power loss, the data on the servers will not be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform after some failure, lengthening the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the only file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.