Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and consequently, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work properly since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case 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 disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Numerous widespread file systems either do not offer 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 problem on internet hosting servers where huge volumes of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced instantly 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 rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple 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

You won't encounter any silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions as the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is allotted to each and every file kept on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the other hard drives. ZFS is the sole file system you will find that uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems that are unable to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.