Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and due to this fact, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function properly since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. When such a problem occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that's a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all the other drives and the harm will become long term. Many popular file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on hosting servers where large volumes of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We've dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you go for one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans, you will not need to be concerned about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - a high level file system which keeps track of all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between a number of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, alternative file systems execute checks only after a system malfunction, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the other disks as well and you can lose important data. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.