Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and for that reason, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. When this kind of an issue occurs and it's not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all of the other drives and the damage will be long term. Many 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 very common problem on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our shared website hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very 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

You won't experience any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server plans due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all of your files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file stored on a server. Since we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard drives. ZFS is the only file system you can get which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that cannot detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.