Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and as a consequence, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should since its bits will 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. If such a problem occurs and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all of the other drives and the harm will be permanent. A large number of widespread file systems either don't feature 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 substantial amounts of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all of our web hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one in existence that checks all of the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be protected against silent data corruption since all of our storage servers use the advanced ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to verify the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on several redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all disks. All the copies of a given file will feature the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, and if it detects a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some breakdown, extending the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the only file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.