Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function properly since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etc. If this kind of a problem occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all of the other drives and the damage will become long term. Many widespread file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all the files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You won't have to deal with any silent data corruption issues in case you buy one of our semi-dedicated server plans since the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all files are undamaged all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Since we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In the event that it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any possibility of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you can get which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which cannot identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.