Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that this kind of an issue appears and it's not found by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all the other drives and the harm will become permanent. Numerous frequently used file systems either do not have real-time checks or do not have good 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 amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced instantly 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 rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you go for one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans, you will not need to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system that monitors all files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between a couple of SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and if it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done right away, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, alternative file systems execute checks after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the other disks as well and you can lose precious data. As this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.