Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and for that reason, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function properly because its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. In case such an issue appears and it isn't found by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all the other drives and the harm will become permanent. A number of commonly used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all of our website hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be resistant to silent data corruption since all of our storage servers work with the advanced ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to ensure the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several redundant drives being employed in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all disks. All of the copies of a particular file will have the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies right away, so if it discovers a mismatch, that would 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's a sudden blackout, the data on the servers won't get corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some breakdown, lengthening the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.