Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should because its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. If this kind of a problem occurs and it's not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become long term. Numerous commonly used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on hosting servers where large volumes of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
In case you host your websites in a web hosting account from our company, you won't need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All the information that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMes. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this type of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on any drive and then a damaged copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and if a corrupted file is discovered, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your information will stay intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you won't have to be concerned about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system which checks all files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between a number of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, all the other file systems execute checks after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you can lose important info. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to guarantee the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.