The process of files getting damaged owing to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You'll find several fail-safes, but often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice anything. As a result, a bad file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random combination of colors in case 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 quite often fail to detect a problem early enough or require an extensive time period to check all the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We have resolved the matter of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one on the market that checks all the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ 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 have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. If there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ such checks and in addition, even during a file system check after an unexpected blackout, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.