The process of files being corrupted as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are several fail-safes, yet often the data becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see anything. Because of this, a damaged file will be treated as a standard one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. The moment a file gets damaged, it will be partially or completely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they often fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast time period to be able to check all files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
In case you host your sites in a shared web hosting account with our firm, you won't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform uses the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the info that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMes. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this kind of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file won't be corrupted. This could occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and afterwards a damaged copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives immediately and if a corrupted file is identified, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your information will remain unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be resistant to silent data corruption because all our storage servers make use of the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to verify the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on a couple of redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disks. 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 right away, and if it identifies a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it will swap that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unforeseen blackout, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform after some breakdown, lengthening the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the only file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.