The process of files getting corrupted as a result of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more data is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are a couple of fail-safes, yet often the info is corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect anything. As a result, a bad file will be treated as a good one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. Once a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most widespread server file systems include various checks, they frequently fail to find a problem early enough or require a long period of time to be able to check all files and the hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one in existence that checks all files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's 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 duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't have to be concerned about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system that checks all of 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. That file will be synced between a number of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done immediately, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. In comparison, all the other file systems carry out checks after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you could lose crucial information. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to guarantee the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.