Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the losing of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function properly because its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etc. If this kind of an issue appears and it is not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. Many popular file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on internet hosting servers where huge volumes of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one out there that checks all files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced instantly 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 copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be resistant to silent data corruption as all our storage servers use the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to verify the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be kept on a couple of redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same across all drives. All copies of a particular file will feature the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, so if it finds a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's a sudden blackout, 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, extending the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the only file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.