The process of files being corrupted because of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems which hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more data is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find different fail-safes, but often the info becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins notice anything. Thus, a damaged file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other disk drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. When a file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most popular server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to detect a problem early enough or require a long time period to check all files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all of our website hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans, you won't have to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system that keeps track of all 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 synchronized between a couple of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. In comparison, all the other file systems execute checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you can lose crucial data. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.