Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and because of this, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etc. If such an issue appears and it is not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. A large number of commonly used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on internet hosting servers where large amounts of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
In case you host your websites in a web hosting account with our company, you do not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform works with the reliable ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMe drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all drives live and in case a corrupted file is found, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your data will remain intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server 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. Since we store all content on a number of 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 case there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web servers or that it can be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ such checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden power loss, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.