The process of files getting corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more info is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You can find a couple of fail-safes, yet often the data is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see anything. Consequently, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. The moment some file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your content. Although the most commonly used server file systems have various checks, they often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all of the files and the hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
In case you host your sites in a shared web hosting account from our firm, you don't need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform uses the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All the information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMe drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on any drive and then a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives in real time and in the event that a corrupted file is identified, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your information will stay undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you go for one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you won't have to worry about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system that keeps track of all the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synchronized between multiple NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens instantly, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, alternative file systems carry out checks only after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you can lose crucial information. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.