Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly because its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such a problem occurs and it is not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the damage will become permanent. Numerous popular file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on web hosting servers where large volumes of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud web hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting providers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, the exact same information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. In case a file on a drive gets damaged for some reason, yet, it is more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives since alternative file systems do not feature special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy shall be swapped with a good one from another hard drive. Because this happens instantly, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption since all of our storage servers work with the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to ensure the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on several redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all disks. All the copies of a given file will feature the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, so if it detects a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll swap that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, prolonging the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.