Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, 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, and so on. In the event that this kind of a problem occurs and it isn't identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. A large number of popular file systems either don't offer 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 rather common issue on web hosting servers where huge amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

We have resolved the matter of silent data corruption on all our cloud website hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all of the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, 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 copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You won't have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you obtain one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages since the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all the files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is allotted to each and every file stored on a server. Since we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all 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 has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the bad copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard disks. ZFS is the sole file system on the market that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which are not able to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.