Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should because its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such an issue appears and it isn't identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all other drives and the harm will become permanent. Numerous widespread 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 very common issue on hosting servers where substantial volumes of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

If you host your websites in a shared website hosting account from our firm, you don't need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform employs the revolutionary ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All of the information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of SSD drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with such a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on each drive and afterwards a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all the drives in real time and when a corrupted file is located, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your information will stay unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system called ZFS. Its main advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we keep all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. If there is 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 web servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after an unexpected power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.