Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and because of this, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer display a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. When such an issue appears and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all the other drives and the damage will be permanent. A number of widely used file systems either do not have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where huge volumes of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all of our cloud website hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one on the market that checks all the files right away by using 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 synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly 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 duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. In case there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include such checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.