Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer work properly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer present an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, and so on. If this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the damage will be permanent. A large number of widespread file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on hosting servers where large volumes of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've resolved the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be resistant to silent data corruption since all our storage servers make use of the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to ensure the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on a couple of redundant drives operating in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all disks. All copies of a particular file will feature the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies right away, and if it discovers a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll swap that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unexpected power loss, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some malfunction, extending the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.