The process of files being damaged due to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There're a couple of fail-safes, but often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see a thing. Thus, a bad file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. Once a file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most well-known server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to discover a problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to be able to check all of the files and the server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
If you host your websites in a hosting account with our company, you do not need to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform works with the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any kind of information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different SSDs. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on any drive and then a bad copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all drives in real time and when a corrupted file is discovered, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your information will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you won't need to be concerned about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system which monitors all of 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 synced between multiple SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens instantly, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, alternative file systems carry out checks only after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you can lose critical information. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.