Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer show a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that such a problem occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. A number of widely used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on internet hosting servers where large amounts of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one on the market that checks all the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the other SSDs. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You won't experience any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all the files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. 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 chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the sole file system you can get that uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which cannot identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.