The process of files being corrupted as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more information is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You'll find several fail-safes, but often the info gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Thus, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. The moment some file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to find a problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We have tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our cloud hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. When there is a mismatch, the bad 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 damaged copy could remain on our web hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with such checks and in addition, even during a file system check after an unexpected blackout, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.