The process of files getting damaged as a result of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more information is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are a couple of fail-safes, still often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see anything. Thus, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, 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 in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most commonly used server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast time period to check all the files and the hosting server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on our website hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all files right away 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 frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in case 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 copied on the other NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info 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 will not need to be concerned about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system that monitors 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. The file will be synchronized between several 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 a different drive. This happens in real time, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, alternative file systems carry out checks after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the other drives as well and you could lose important information. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we can guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.