The process of files getting damaged because of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face as the larger a hard drive is and the more data is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You will find different fail-safes, but often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Consequently, a bad file will be treated as a good one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. The moment some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most well-known server file systems have various checks, they often fail to identify a problem early enough or require a long period of time to be able to check all of the files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our shared web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually 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 another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We have avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative 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 keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. If there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because this happens right away, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems include such checks and in addition, even during a file system check right after an unexpected power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.