Data corruption is the unintended 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 consequence, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly as its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer present a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of a problem occurs and it is not found by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all other drives and the harm will become long term. A large number of widespread file systems either do not feature 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 common problem on web hosting servers where huge amounts of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. Most internet hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple HDDs to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. When a file on a drive gets corrupted for whatever reason, yet, it's more than likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since other file systems do not include special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy shall be swapped with a good one from another hard disk. Because this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any possibility 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 named ZFS. Its main advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we store all content on multiple NVMe 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. In the event that there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web 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 in addition, even during a file system check after an unexpected power loss, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS won't crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.