The process of files getting corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more information is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're a couple of fail-safes, but often the information gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see a thing. As a result, a damaged file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. When some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems include various checks, they often fail to identify some problem early enough or require a long time period to check all the files and the server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on our hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced promptly 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 requires plenty of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You will not experience any silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server plans since the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all of your files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file kept on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any possibility of the bad copy to be synchronized on the other hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you will find that uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which are unable to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.