Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should as its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer show an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. If this kind of a problem occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an admin, 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 synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Numerous popular file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on web hosting servers where huge volumes of data are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
In case you host your sites in a hosting account with our firm, you will not need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform employs the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this type of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This can occur throughout the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives live and in the event that a corrupted file is found, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. In this way, your data will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we save all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. In the event that there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after an unexpected blackout, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.