Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer present a real 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 a problem occurs and it is not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. A number of widely used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on web hosting servers where huge amounts of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

We have resolved the issue of silent data corruption on our cloud web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one in existence which checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced right away 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 duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you buy one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you will not have to worry about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system that monitors all the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between a couple of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, alternative file systems carry out checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you may lose important info. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.