Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and as a consequence, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer show an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. When this kind of an issue appears and it is not found by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all the other drives and the damage will be long term. A number of commonly used file systems either do not feature 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 data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared web hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard disks to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, the exact same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive becomes corrupted for whatever reason, yet, it is more than likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since alternative file systems do not offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from a different hard drive. Because this happens immediately, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its main advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. In the event that there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since it happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web servers or that it can be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check after a sudden power loss, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.