Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and due to this fact, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, and so on. If this kind of an issue appears and it's not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. Many commonly used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
We have resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all our hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art 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 immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't have to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done right away, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, all the other file systems execute checks only after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you may lose critical info. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.