Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the losing of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case such a problem occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all other drives and the damage will become permanent. Numerous widespread file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've resolved the matter of silent data corruption on all of our web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be protected against silent data corruption because all our storage servers make use of the reliable ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to ensure the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be saved on a couple of redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all disks. All copies of a particular file will feature the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies in real time, so if it registers a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll substitute that file with a good copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is a sudden blackout, the data on the servers will not be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some failure, extending the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the only file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.