Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. If this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all other drives and the damage will become permanent. Numerous widely used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all of our web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one in existence which checks all files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the other SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be shielded from silent data corruption since all of our storage servers use the advanced ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be kept on several redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disk drives. All the copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, and if it discovers a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it will swap that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's a sudden power loss, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform after some malfunction, prolonging the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.