The process of files being damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more info is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are various fail-safes, yet often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Consequently, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. When a file gets damaged, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, therefore 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 site content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to find a problem early enough or require a vast time period to be able to check all files and the web hosting server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've resolved the problem of silent data corruption on all our web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files right away 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 continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced promptly 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 copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system called ZFS. Its main 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 save all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our servers or that it can be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with such checks and in addition, even during a file system check after an unexpected power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS won't crash after an electrical power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.