Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and as a consequence, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't found by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all the other drives and the damage will become long term. Numerous widely used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on internet hosting servers where large volumes of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all of our 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 in existence which checks all 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 continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.