The process of files getting damaged resulting from some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet 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 get corrupted. You'll find various fail-safes, still often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other disk drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. Once a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random mix 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 widely used server file systems feature 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 hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We have tackled the issue of silent data corruption on our hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one in existence which checks all the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that 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 examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced right away 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 copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You will not have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever if you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions as the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file kept on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the remaining drives. ZFS is the only file system out there that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are unable to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.