Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer present an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that this kind of a problem appears and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. A large number of frequently used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on hosting servers where huge amounts of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting
We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all of our cloud website hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all of the files in real time 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 compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you buy one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't have to be concerned about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synced between multiple SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and if it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens in real time, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, other file systems perform checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the other drives as well and you may lose crucial data. As this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.