Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the losing of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer present an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. When such a problem appears and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all of the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Numerous frequently used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on internet hosting servers where huge volumes of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
In case you host your websites in a web hosting account from our company, you do not need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since 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. Any kind of data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMe drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not 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 other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and in case a corrupted file is found, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your information will continue to be intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you will not have to worry about silent file corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system which checks all the files in real time. Whenever 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 synced between a number of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens right away, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, all of the other file systems perform checks after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the other drives as well and you can lose important data. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.