The process of files getting damaged resulting from some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more data is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find various fail-safes, yet often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice anything. Thus, a bad file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random mix 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 frequently used server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to find a problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to check all the files and the web server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and when 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 corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You will not need to deal with any silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you obtain one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages because the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all the files are undamaged all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Because we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any probability of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the other drives. ZFS is the sole file system you will find which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are not able to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.