Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and because of this, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that this kind of an issue appears and it isn't recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Many widespread 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 very common problem on internet hosting servers where large volumes of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

If you host your sites in a hosting account with our firm, you will not have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform uses the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All the data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMes. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives live and in case a corrupted file is found, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your information will stay undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you won't need to worry about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system which checks all the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between a couple of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens in real time, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, other file systems perform checks only after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you may lose critical info. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.