Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the losing of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case this kind of an issue appears and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. A number of widespread file systems either do not offer real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will 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 Web Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites in a web hosting account from our company, you do not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform uses the outstanding ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMe drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with such a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This can happen at the time of the writing process on any drive and then a corrupted copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives immediately and if a corrupted file is found, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your data will continue to be intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You won't experience any silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server plans because the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all of the files are undamaged all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is allotted to each and every file saved on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In case 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 right away, avoiding any probability of the bad copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard drives. ZFS is the sole file system available on the market that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which are not able to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.