The process of files getting corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You can find several fail-safes, yet often the information gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see anything. Consequently, a corrupted file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. Once a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will not 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 frequently used server file systems include various checks, they often fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all files and the web server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our website hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is 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 constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your info 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 in case you get one of our semi-dedicated server solutions because the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all of your files are undamaged all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Because we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the bad copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you can get that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that cannot identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.