Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer present a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In case such an issue occurs and it is not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of frequently used file systems either do not 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 issue on hosting servers where substantial volumes of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on our hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one on the market that checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you won't have to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done instantly, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, all the other file systems carry out checks after a system malfunction, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the other drives as well and you may lose important info. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.