Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and consequently, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should because its bits will be scrambled or lost. 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 for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If such a problem appears and it isn't noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all of the other drives and the damage will become long term. Many widespread file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on web hosting servers where huge volumes of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared web hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. Most of the internet hosting providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive becomes corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it is very likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since alternative file systems do not offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy will be substituted with a good one from another disk drive. Since this happens in real time, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you purchase one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you won't need to worry about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system which monitors all files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between multiple SSD 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 when it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens right away, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, alternative file systems carry out 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 other disks as well and you can lose important information. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.