Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. If this kind of an issue occurs and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all other drives and the harm will be permanent. A number of widespread file systems either do not have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on internet hosting servers where huge volumes of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new web hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we make use of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, the exact same info is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive is damaged for some reason, yet, it is very likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as alternative file systems do not have special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each 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 substituted with a good one from another disk drive. Because this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we save all content on numerous SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our servers or that it can be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with such checks and in addition, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.