Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should since 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 as its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such a problem appears and it isn't recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will be long term. Many widely used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on internet hosting servers where substantial amounts of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the remaining SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You won't need to deal with any silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all the files are undamaged all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file saved on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the bad copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard drives. ZFS is the sole file system you will find that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which are not able to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.