Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that such an issue appears and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all other drives and the damage will be long term. Numerous popular file systems either do not 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 rather common issue on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our shared hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one on the market that checks all of the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's 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 analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use 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

You will not experience any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans because the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all the files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is allotted to each and every file stored on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the other drives. ZFS is the sole file system available on the market that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are unable to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.