Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and because of this, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly as its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case such a problem occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become permanent. A number of widely used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we make use of on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting providers, including our company, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive becomes corrupted for some reason, yet, it's very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives since alternative file systems don't have special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the bad copy will be swapped with a good one from a different hard disk drive. As this happens right away, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other 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 because it happens right away, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check after a sudden power failure, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after an electrical power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.