The process of files getting corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face as the larger a hard drive is and the more info is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are different fail-safes, but often the information gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice anything. Consequently, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your site content. Although the most well-known server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to identify some problem early enough or require a vast time period in order 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 resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all our website 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 out there which checks all files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple very 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 Servers
You will not encounter any kind of silent data corruption issues should you buy one of our semi-dedicated server packages due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all of your files are undamaged at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file stored on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the other hard disks. ZFS is the only file system available on the market which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.