The process of files being corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more information is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are several fail-safes, yet often the info becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice anything. As a result, a corrupted file will be handled 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 for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. The moment some file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most well-known server file systems include various checks, they frequently fail to identify a problem early enough or require an extensive time period to check all files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all our web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory 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

We've avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we save all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens instantly, there's no chance that a damaged copy could 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 use such checks and in addition, even during a file system check right after a sudden blackout, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS won't crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.