The process of files being damaged owing to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more info is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You'll find various fail-safes, yet often the information becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see a thing. As a result, a corrupted file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. Once a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your site content. Although the most widespread server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to identify a problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all of the files and the hosting server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all of our cloud web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you go for one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you will not have to worry about silent file corruption since we use ZFS - a high level file system that monitors all of the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done immediately, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, other file systems execute checks only after a system failure, 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 other disks as well and you can lose critical info. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.