The process of files being damaged owing to some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which hosting companies face as the larger a hard drive is and the more data is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find a couple of fail-safes, still often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. Because of this, a bad file will be handled as a good one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. The moment some file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer 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 losing your content. Although the most well-known server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to identify a problem early enough or require a vast amount of time in order to check all the files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We've resolved the matter of silent data corruption on all of our shared hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all of the files immediately by using 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 frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption because all our storage servers make use of the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to ensure the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all disks. All of the copies of a given file will feature the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies quickly, so if it discovers a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will swap that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is an unexpected blackout, the data on the servers will not become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, lengthening the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the file system which can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.