Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer present a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. When such a problem appears and it is not noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will be permanent. A large number of popular file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have good ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on web hosting servers where huge volumes of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
If you host your sites in a shared hosting account with our firm, you won't have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform employs the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All of the info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMe drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on any drive and then a bad copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives in real time and if a corrupted file is located, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your data will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens right away, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web servers or that it could be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and what is more, even during a file system check following a sudden blackout, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.