The process of files being corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more data is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find various fail-safes, yet often the info gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see a thing. Thus, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other disk drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast time period to check all the files and the server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our shared website hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one out there that checks all of the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced instantly 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 duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be resistant to silent data corruption because all our storage servers employ the advanced ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to verify the integrity of every single 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 on all drives. All of the copies of a specific file will feature the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies quickly, and if it discovers a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it will replace that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform after some failure, prolonging the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the only file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.