Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or missing. 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 since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If such a problem occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all the other drives and the harm will become permanent. Numerous widespread file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on web hosting servers where huge volumes of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared web hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we employ on our cloud platform. The vast majority of internet hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple HDDs to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. In case a file on a drive is corrupted for some reason, yet, it is more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives since other file systems don't offer special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the bad copy will be substituted with a good one from a different drive. As this happens instantly, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't need to worry about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system which keeps track of all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between a number of SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done instantly, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. In comparison, all of the other file systems carry out checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you may lose crucial information. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.