The process of files being damaged resulting from some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are various fail-safes, still often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see anything. Consequently, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to find a problem early enough or require an extensive period 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 Web Hosting
If you host your websites in a web hosting account with our company, you won't have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform works with the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMe drives. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This could happen during the writing process on any drive and after that a bad copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all of the drives instantly and when a corrupted file is discovered, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your data will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You won't experience any silent data corruption issues whatsoever if you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions as the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all the files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file saved on a server. Since we store all content on a number of 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 right away, avoiding any probability of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you can get which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.