Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. 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 for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such a problem occurs and it is not found by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all the other drives and the harm will become long term. Numerous frequently used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on hosting servers where substantial volumes of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all of our hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one out there that checks all the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and if 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 damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems use such checks and in addition, even during a file system check right after a sudden power failure, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.