Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and due to this fact, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such an issue occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. A large number of widely used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on internet hosting servers where large amounts of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites in a cloud hosting account from our firm, you won't need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform employs the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many SSDs. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this type of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This can happen during the writing process on each drive and afterwards a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives live and if a corrupted file is located, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your information will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You won't have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues in case you buy one of our semi-dedicated server packages due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all of the files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file kept on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In case 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 without delay, avoiding any chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you can find which uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.