Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and consequently, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer show an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. If such a problem occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all other drives and the harm will be permanent. A large number of commonly used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on internet hosting servers where substantial amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our shared web hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one out there that checks all files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced immediately 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 rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we save all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. If there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after a sudden electrical power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.