The process of files being damaged because of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more data is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There're several fail-safes, still often the data is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see a thing. Consequently, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. The moment some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to detect a problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time in order to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our web hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one in existence that checks all the files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly 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 promptly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we save all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our website hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and what is more, even during a file system check after an unexpected power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.