Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and because of this, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer work properly because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, 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, etcetera. When such an issue occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all other drives and the damage will be long term. A large number of frequently used file systems either do not have 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 matter on hosting servers where large volumes of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our cloud web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced promptly 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 duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be shielded from silent data corruption since all of our storage servers employ the efficient ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to guarantee the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be placed on several redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disks. All the copies of a specific file will feature the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies quickly, and if it discovers a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will substitute that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is a sudden power failure, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some breakdown, lengthening the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the only file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.