Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case such a problem occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all the other drives and the damage will become long term. A large number of widely used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on hosting servers where huge volumes of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one out there that checks all files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we store all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens instantly, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check following an unexpected power loss, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a blackout and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.