Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the losing of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and because of this, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer present an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case this kind of a problem appears and it is not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the damage will be permanent. A large number of popular file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We have resolved the issue of silent data corruption on our cloud 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 that checks all the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from another 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 NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its main advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. In the event that there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and what is more, even during a file system check following an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.