Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the losing of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and because of this, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer function properly as its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer display a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of a problem appears and it is not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that's a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all the other drives and the damage will be long term. Many widespread file systems either don't offer 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 very common problem on web hosting servers where large amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

We have resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all our website hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.