Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the losing of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly because its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer show a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that such a problem occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Numerous popular file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on internet hosting servers where substantial amounts of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our shared website hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one out there that checks all files in real time by using 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 NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption as all our storage servers make use of the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to guarantee the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on a couple of redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all drives. All the copies of a particular file will feature the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies in real time, and if it identifies a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll swap that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers won't get corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform following some breakdown, extending the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.