The process of files being corrupted owing to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems that hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There're a couple of fail-safes, but often the info gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. Consequently, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. Once a file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most widely used server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all of the files and the web server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our web hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one in existence which checks all of the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each 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 the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple 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
Your semi-dedicated server account will be shielded from silent data corruption because all our storage servers use the reliable ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to ensure the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on a couple of redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all drives. All the copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies in real time, so if it registers a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace that file with a good copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is a sudden power failure, the data on the servers will not get corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform after some malfunction, prolonging the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.