The process of files being corrupted as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more information is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find a couple of fail-safes, but often the data becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. Once a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors if 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 feature various checks, they are likely to fail to find a problem early enough or require a long amount of time to be able to check all the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

If you host your websites in a web hosting account from our company, you do not have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform employs the revolutionary ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any kind of info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of NVMe drives. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this type of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This may happen during the writing process on each drive and afterwards a bad copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives live and in case a corrupted file is located, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your information will stay undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be resistant to silent data corruption as all of our storage servers use the efficient ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to verify the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be saved on several redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disk drives. All of the copies of a given file will have the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, so if it identifies a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll swap that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unforeseen power failure, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some failure, prolonging the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.