Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and as a consequence, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such an issue appears and it isn't identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all other drives and the damage will become long term. Many popular file systems either don't have real-time checks or don't have good ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on hosting servers where large amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we make use of on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive is corrupted for reasons unknown, yet, it's more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as other file systems do not include special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the bad copy shall be substituted with a good one from another disk drive. Because this happens immediately, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption since all our storage servers employ the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on a couple of redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disk drives. All of the copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, so if it registers a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will replace that file with a good copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers won't get corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, prolonging the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.