The process of files getting damaged as a result of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more data is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are various fail-safes, still often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see a thing. Because of this, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, so 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, so you risk losing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems feature various checks, they frequently fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast period of time to check all of the files and the hosting server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
We've resolved the matter of silent data corruption on all of our shared website hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all of the files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away 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 copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You will not need to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues in case you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all files are undamaged all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is allotted to each and every file saved on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In the event that it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the rest of the drives. ZFS is the sole file system you can get which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which are not able to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.