The process of files getting corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more information is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find various fail-safes, but often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice anything. As a result, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast period of time to be able to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all of our shared hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is 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 the event that 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 bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You won't experience any silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages since the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all the files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file saved on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In the event that it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the bad copy to be synchronized on the rest of the drives. ZFS is the only file system out there which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.