Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the losing of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of an issue occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the harm will become permanent. A number of widely used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on internet hosting servers where large volumes of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting
We've dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all of our cloud website hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You will not experience any kind of silent data corruption issues should you buy one of our semi-dedicated server packages because the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all files are undamaged all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file stored on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the bad copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard drives. ZFS is the only file system you will find which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which cannot identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.