Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should since its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that this kind of an issue occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all of the other drives and the damage will be permanent. A large number of widely used file systems either do not 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 rather common issue on hosting servers where large volumes of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be shielded from silent data corruption because all our storage servers make use of the reliable ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on a couple of redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all disk drives. All copies of a specific file will feature the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies in real time, and if it finds a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is an unexpected power loss, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some malfunction, lengthening the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.