Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly because its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such a problem occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will be long term. A large number of widely used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on internet hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all of our web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all the files in real time by employing 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 constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its main advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we store all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. When there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following an unexpected power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.