The process of files getting corrupted owing to 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 stored on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find different fail-safes, still often the info gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins notice a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be treated as a good one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will display 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 popular server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to discover a problem early enough or require a long amount of time to check all the files and the hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our shared web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one in existence which checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case 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 is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its basic advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. If there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens right away, there's no chance that a corrupted 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 employ this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after a sudden electrical power failure, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.