The process of files being damaged due to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems which Internet hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There're different fail-safes, yet often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see a thing. Because of this, a bad file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. The moment some file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most frequently used server file systems include various checks, they often fail to find some problem early enough or require a long period of time in order to check all of the files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all of our cloud web hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from some other 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 needs lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You will not encounter any silent data corruption issues should you purchase one of our semi-dedicated server plans because the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all of the files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on a number of drives simultaneously, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If 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 without delay, avoiding any possibility of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard drives. ZFS is the only file system you can find that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.