The process of files getting damaged resulting from some hardware or software failure is known as 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 be corrupted. There are different fail-safes, still often the data becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Consequently, a bad file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. The moment a file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, which means that 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, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most widespread server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to be able to check all files and the web hosting 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 leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one on the market that checks all files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we save all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. In case there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.