Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and consequently, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly as its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of an issue occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all the other drives and the harm will be permanent. A number of frequently used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on web hosting servers where substantial volumes of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
In case you host your websites in a cloud web hosting account with our firm, you don't need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform employs the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different SSD drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This could occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all the drives right away and in the event that a corrupted file is discovered, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your data will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We've avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we keep all content on numerous SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens instantly, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following an unexpected power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.