Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that such a problem appears and it's not found by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all the other drives and the harm will be permanent. A large number of commonly used file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all of our hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art 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 right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we save all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. In the event that there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens in real time, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web servers or that it can be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check following an unexpected power failure, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.