Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the losing of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If such a problem occurs and it is not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of popular file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on web hosting servers where large amounts of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all our hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all the 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 frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case 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 corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be shielded from silent data corruption as all of our storage servers use the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be saved on several redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disks. All the copies of a particular file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies right away, and if it finds a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers will not become corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform after some failure, lengthening the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the sole file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.