Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file could 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 for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such an issue occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the harm will be long term. A large number of frequently used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our web hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced promptly 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 duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You won't experience any kind of silent data corruption issues should you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans as the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all of the files are undamaged at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file saved on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on a number of drives simultaneously, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any possibility of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard drives. ZFS is the sole file system on the market that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are not able to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.