Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer show an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all other drives and the damage will become permanent. A large number of widespread file systems either don't offer real-time checks or do not have good ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on hosting servers where substantial amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all of our shared website hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you go for one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you will not have to be concerned about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all of the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between multiple SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens instantly, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, alternative file systems perform checks after a system malfunction, 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 remaining drives as well and you could lose precious information. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.