Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly as its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. In the event that this kind of an issue appears and it is not found by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all the other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of commonly used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
In case you host your websites in a website hosting account with our firm, you won't have to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform employs the reliable ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMe drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This can happen during the writing process on each drive and then a damaged copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives right away and if a corrupted file is identified, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. In this way, your info will continue to be intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you get one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you won't need to be concerned about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system which keeps track of all of the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and when it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, alternative file systems perform checks after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the other disks as well and you may lose crucial info. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.