The process of files being damaged as a result of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems that hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more data is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are several fail-safes, yet often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Because of this, a damaged file will be treated as a standard one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. When some file gets damaged, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to identify some problem early enough or require a long period of time in order to check all the files and the server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all of the files instantly by employing 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 regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from another 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 needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we store all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. When there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since it happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check after a sudden power loss, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after an electrical power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.