Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and due to this fact, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work properly since its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. When this kind of a problem occurs and it isn't found by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will become long term. Many frequently used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all our shared web hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one on the market that checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you buy one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans, you won't have to worry about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system that keeps track of 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 a number of SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens right away, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, all of the other file systems execute checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you may lose important information. As this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.