Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and due to this fact, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function properly because its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer present a real 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. If this kind of an issue appears and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all other drives and the harm will become permanent. Many widespread file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on internet hosting servers where huge volumes of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all our web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.