Data corruption is the unintentional modification 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 could become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. When this kind of an issue occurs and it is not found by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all of 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 don't have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where large volumes of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. The vast majority of internet hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple hard disks to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive is damaged for whatever reason, yet, it is very likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as alternative file systems do not offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy will be swapped with a good one from a different hard disk. Since this happens right away, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be shielded from silent data corruption since all of our storage servers employ the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to verify the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be placed on a couple of redundant drives operating in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disks. All of the copies of a given file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, and if it detects a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unexpected power loss, the data on the servers will not get corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some failure, prolonging the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the file system which can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.