Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such a problem appears and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Many widespread file systems either don't have real-time checks or don't have good ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

In case you host your sites in a cloud website hosting account from our firm, you will not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform employs the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All the information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many SSD drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This can happen at the time of the writing process on each drive and then a damaged copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives live and in the event that a corrupted file is located, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your information will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you buy one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages, you won't have to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system that monitors all of the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synchronized between a number of SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens in real time, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, all of the other file systems perform checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the remaining drives as well and you could lose crucial information. As this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.