The process of files getting corrupted as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, but often the information gets corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice a thing. As a result, a bad file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. Once some file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most frequently used server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to detect some problem early enough or require a long amount of time to check all files and the server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new web hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud platform. The vast majority of internet hosting service providers, like our firm, use multiple hard disks to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same data is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive becomes damaged for some reason, yet, it is more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because other file systems do not offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from a different drive. Because this happens in real time, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we store all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following an unexpected power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.