Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer work properly because its bits shall be scrambled or lost. 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 since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that this kind of a problem occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all the other drives and the harm will become long term. A large number of widespread file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

If you host your sites in a hosting account from our company, you don't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of SSD drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This may happen during the writing process on any drive and then a bad copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives in real time and in case a corrupted file is found, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your information will remain intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You won't encounter any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server plans as the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file kept on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any chance of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the other hard disks. ZFS is the sole file system you will find that uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.