The process of files being corrupted as a result of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more info is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find a couple of fail-safes, but often the information is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice anything. Thus, a bad file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your content. Although the most well-known server file systems include various checks, they frequently fail to find a problem early enough or require an extensive period of time to be able to check all files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

In case you host your sites in a web hosting account from our company, you won't have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform uses the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMes. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on any drive and afterwards a bad copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives right away and when a corrupted file is located, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your information will remain intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. When there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden power loss, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.