Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should since 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 because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that such a problem occurs and it is not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will be long term. Numerous frequently used file systems either do not have real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most web hosting providers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same information is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive becomes damaged for whatever reason, however, it is very likely that it will be copied on the other drives as other file systems do not feature special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy will be replaced with a good one from another disk drive. Since this happens right away, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you will not have to worry about silent file corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system that monitors all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between a number of SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens right away, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, alternative file systems execute checks after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the other drives as well and you could lose crucial information. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.