Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a true 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 become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. A number of widely used file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. Most hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for some reason, however, it is likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because alternative file systems don't include special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy shall be swapped with a good one from a different drive. Since this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.

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 use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. In the event that there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after an unexpected power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.