Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly because its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. If this kind of a problem occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all the other drives and the harm will become long term. A large number of widely used file systems either do not have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on internet hosting servers where large amounts of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting
In case you host your websites in a cloud website hosting account from our company, you won't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous SSD drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this type of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This could occur during the writing process on each drive and afterwards a bad copy can be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives immediately and in case a corrupted file is discovered, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your data will stay undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You won't need to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages since the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all of the files are undamaged all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is allotted to each and every file stored on a server. Since we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the only file system on the market that uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which cannot detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.