The process of files getting damaged resulting from some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems that Internet 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. You'll find several fail-safes, yet often the data is damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see a thing. Because of this, a damaged file will be treated as a good one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. Once some file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most widely used server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to find a problem early enough or require a long period of time to check all the files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all of our cloud hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one out there that checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its main advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we keep all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In case there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check after a sudden power failure, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.