The process of files getting corrupted because of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more info is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You can find various fail-safes, but often the information is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Thus, a damaged file will be treated as a good one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. Once a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most commonly used server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to identify some problem early enough or require a long amount of time to be able to check all files and the hosting server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on our shared web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption as all of our storage servers make use of the effective ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be placed on a couple of redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all drives. All the copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, and if it identifies a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it will swap that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unexpected power failure, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, extending the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the only file system which can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.