Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etc. When such an issue appears and it isn't identified by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all other drives and the harm will be long term. A large number of frequently used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on internet hosting servers where large amounts of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there that checks all files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines 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 is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You won't encounter any silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions as the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to guarantee that all the files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is allotted to each and every file stored on a server. Since we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all of 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 right away, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the other drives. ZFS is the sole file system available on the market which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are not able to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.