Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function properly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that this kind of an issue appears 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 drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all of the other drives and the harm will become permanent. Numerous popular file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on web hosting servers where large amounts of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

If you host your sites in a website hosting account with our company, you won't need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform employs the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different SSDs. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with such a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on each drive and afterwards a damaged copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives right away and in case a corrupted file is identified, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That 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

If you get one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you will not need to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between several SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens in real time, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, all the other file systems perform checks after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you can lose crucial data. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.