The process of files getting damaged because 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 is and the more info is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There're different fail-safes, but often the information gets corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see a thing. As a result, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. The moment a file gets damaged, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they are likely to fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast time period to be able to check all of the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We've resolved the matter of silent data corruption on all our shared web hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's 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 duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In case there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after a sudden power failure, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.