Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly as its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. If such an issue appears and it's not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the harm will become long term. A large number of commonly used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that can 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 stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one out there that checks all the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you go for one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you will not have to worry about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system which monitors all the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synced between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, all of the other file systems carry out checks only after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you may lose important data. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.