Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, and so on. When such an issue occurs and it's not found by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Many widespread file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of data are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites in a website hosting account from our firm, you will not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform works with the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMe drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This may happen throughout the writing process on any drive and afterwards a corrupted copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all drives in real time and if a corrupted file is found, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your info will stay intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we keep all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because it happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check after an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a power loss and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.