The process of files getting corrupted as a result of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There are various fail-safes, yet often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice anything. Because of this, a damaged file will be handled as a good one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your website content. Although the most frequently used server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a long time period 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've dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all of 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 out there that checks all of the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced immediately with a good copy from another 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 needs lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you will not have to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system that checks all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between a couple of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done right away, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, all the other file systems execute checks after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you could lose important information. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.