The process of files getting corrupted because of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems which Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more information is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You will find several fail-safes, yet often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. Once some file gets corrupted, it will be partly 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 shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast amount of time in order to check all of the files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

If you host your websites in a cloud hosting account from our company, you won't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform works with the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the information that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMe drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a bad copy can be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and if a corrupted file is found, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your information will stay intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its basic advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we save all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens instantly, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after an unexpected power failure, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.