The process of files being corrupted because of 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 information is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're several fail-safes, but often the data is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice anything. Because of this, a bad file will be handled as a good one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. When a file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most widely used server file systems include various checks, they often fail to find a problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to check all of the files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all of the files in real time by using 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 examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be undamaged 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 work with the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to ensure the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several redundant drives being employed in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all drives. All copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, so if it registers a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will swap that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unexpected blackout, the data on the servers will not be corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some malfunction, extending the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the only file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.