The process of files being damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems which hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more info is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There're a couple of fail-safes, but often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Thus, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer 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 site content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to detect some problem early enough or require a vast period of time to check all of the files and the server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our website 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 that checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs 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 employ multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is 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 other drives and the one it has saved. If there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use such checks and what's more, even during a file system check right after a sudden blackout, none of them can identify 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 obsolete.