Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer display an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such an issue appears and it's not found by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that's a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will become permanent. A large number of commonly used file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on internet hosting servers where large volumes of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

If you host your sites in a cloud hosting account from our firm, you do not need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform uses the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All the information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of SSDs. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This may happen during the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives right away and in case a corrupted file is identified, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. In this way, your info will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You won't encounter any kind of silent data corruption issues should you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all of the files are undamaged all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file kept on a server. Because we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any possibility of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the remaining drives. ZFS is the only file system you will find which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which are unable to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.