The process of files getting corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more data is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find several fail-safes, yet often the information is damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see anything. 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 duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. Once a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most widespread server file systems have various checks, they often fail to identify some problem early enough or require a long time period in order to check all the files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

In case you host your sites in a web hosting account with our firm, you will not have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform employs the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMe drives. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on each drive and afterwards a damaged copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives instantly and when a corrupted file is identified, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your info will remain intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we store all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. If there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since it happens instantly, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our website hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with such checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after a sudden power failure, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.