The process of files getting corrupted as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which Internet hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find several fail-safes, yet often the information is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Consequently, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. Once some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors in case 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 have various checks, they often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a vast time period to check all the files and the web server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's 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 in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be protected against silent data corruption since all our storage servers employ the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same across all disks. 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 identifies a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unexpected power failure, the data on the servers won't get corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform following some malfunction, prolonging the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the only file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.