Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and due to this fact, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. If this kind of a problem appears and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all other drives and the damage will be permanent. A large number of widespread file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared website hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud platform. The majority of hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard disks to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive is damaged for reasons unknown, however, it is more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as other file systems do not have special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the bad copy will be swapped with a good one from a different disk drive. Since this happens immediately, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we save all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. In case there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens instantly, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems use such checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after a sudden blackout, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.