Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly as its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such an issue occurs and it's not noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all other drives and the damage will become long term. Numerous frequently used file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a web hosting account with our firm, you don't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform uses the amazing ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMe drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file won't be corrupted. This could occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy can be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and when a corrupted file is discovered, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. In this way, your info will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you buy one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't have to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system which checks all files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synchronized between a couple of NVMe 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 damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done immediately, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, all the other file systems perform checks after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you may lose critical info. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.