The process of files being corrupted owing to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems which web hosting companies face as the larger a hard drive is and the more information is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are various fail-safes, but often the data is damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see a thing. Thus, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most well-known server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to find some problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time to be able to check all of the files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and if 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 corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you get one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you won't need to worry about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all 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 synchronized between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and when it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done instantly, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, alternative file systems execute checks after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the remaining drives as well and you could lose precious data. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.