Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. In case such a problem appears and it's not found by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Many frequently used file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on internet hosting servers where huge volumes of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud platform. Most hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive becomes damaged for reasons unknown, yet, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives since other file systems don't include special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the bad copy shall be substituted with a good one from another hard drive. Since this happens immediately, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we store all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because this happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include such checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden power loss, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.