The process of files being corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more data is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You'll find various fail-safes, yet often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins notice a thing. Consequently, a damaged file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. Once a file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most widespread server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to check all files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We've dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on our shared website hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you go for one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you will not have to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system that monitors all files in real time. Every time 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 synchronized between a couple 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 when it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens in real time, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, alternative file systems carry out checks after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you may lose critical info. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we guarantee the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.