Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If this kind of an issue appears and it isn't recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all the other drives and the harm will be permanent. Many popular file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on web hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
In case you host your sites in a shared hosting account with our firm, you do not have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform works with the outstanding ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple SSDs. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on each drive and then a damaged copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all the drives in real time and when a corrupted file is located, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. In this way, your information will remain undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you get one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you will not need to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system that keeps track of all 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 SSD 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 if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, all of the other file systems execute checks only after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you can lose critical data. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.