Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer present a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such a problem occurs and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all other drives and the damage will be permanent. A large number of widely used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
We have resolved the problem of silent data corruption on our hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you won't have to be concerned about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system which checks all files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between several NVMe 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 damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done immediately, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, other file systems execute checks only after a system malfunction, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you could lose important info. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.