The process of files getting damaged caused by some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which Internet 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 be corrupted. You'll find different fail-safes, but often the information becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see anything. Thus, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most widely used server file systems include various checks, they frequently fail to discover some problem early enough or require a long amount of time to check all the files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all of our website hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all files in real time 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 frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We have avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on a number of 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 stored. When there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.