Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly as its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of an issue occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become permanent. A number of frequently used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

If you host your sites in a hosting account with our company, you don't need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform employs the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All the info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of NVMes. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this type of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This can occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and afterwards a bad copy can be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all of the drives immediately and in case a corrupted file is identified, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your data will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you purchase one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you will not need to worry about silent file corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system that checks all files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between a number of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all 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 is done instantly, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any time. In comparison, all of the other file systems carry out checks after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you may lose critical data. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.