The process of files getting damaged due to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that Internet hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find several fail-safes, but often the info gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see a thing. Because of this, a bad file will be handled as a good one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most well-known server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a vast time period to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our shared website hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced immediately 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 duplicated on the other SSDs. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't need to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system which monitors 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 synced between multiple SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done right away, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, all of the other 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 can't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the other disks as well and you can lose crucial information. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.