Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and consequently, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such a problem occurs and it is not found by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. A number of popular file systems either don't offer real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on hosting servers where substantial volumes of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
If you host your Internet sites in a hosting account with our firm, you don't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform works with the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This can happen at the time of the writing process on any drive and after that a bad copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all drives immediately and if a corrupted file is identified, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your info will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages, you will not need to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system which monitors all the 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. This file will be synced 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 the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, all the other file systems perform checks only 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 bad copy may be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you may lose important info. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.