The process of files getting corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems which web hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more information is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There are a couple of fail-safes, still often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice anything. Because of this, a bad file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to discover a problem early enough or require a vast period of time to be able to check all the files and the web server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
If you host your Internet sites in a web hosting account with our company, you don't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform employs the revolutionary ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMe drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with such a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on any drive and then a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all of the drives right away and in case a corrupted file is discovered, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your information will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you buy 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 which keeps track of all of the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synced 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 when 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 time. In contrast, other file systems execute checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the other disks as well and you may lose crucial info. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.