The process of files getting corrupted owing to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more information is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're a couple of fail-safes, but often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. As a result, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your site content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to find a problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time to be able to check all of the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all our shared website hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the other SSDs. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You will not have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues should you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server solutions as the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to guarantee that all files are undamaged all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file stored on a server. Because we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any possibility of the bad copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard drives. ZFS is the only file system on the market that uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which cannot detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.