The process of files getting corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You'll find different fail-safes, but often the information gets corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Thus, a damaged file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk 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. When some file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your content. Although the most widespread server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to detect some problem early enough or require a long period of time to be able to check all of the files and the web hosting server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
We have tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our website hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one in existence that checks all files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we save all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web servers or that it can be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this kind of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following an unexpected power loss, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.