The process of files being corrupted as a result of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There're different fail-safes, but often the data becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see anything. As a result, a bad file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard 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 partly or entirely 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 website content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to find a problem early enough or require a long amount of time in order to check all of the files and the server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We've resolved the matter of silent data corruption on our shared 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 which checks all the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every 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 analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be resistant to silent data corruption as all our storage servers work with the effective ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to verify the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be kept on a couple of redundant drives being employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disk drives. All the copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates quickly, so if it identifies a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will swap that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unexpected power failure, the data on the servers will not get corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some malfunction, prolonging the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.