The process of files being corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You'll find different fail-safes, still often the data becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect a thing. As a result, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most widespread server file systems feature various checks, they frequently fail to detect some problem early enough or require an extensive period of time to be able 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 Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites in a shared hosting account with our firm, you don't need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform uses the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any information that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMe drives. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This can occur during the writing process on each drive and after that a bad copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives in real time and in the event that a corrupted file is discovered, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your info will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you buy one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you will not have to be concerned about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system that keeps track of all the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between a number of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all 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 is done immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, all the other file systems carry out checks after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you could lose crucial info. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.