The process of files being damaged caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more info is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You can find various fail-safes, but often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. Thus, a damaged file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. The moment some file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to check all files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
In case you host your websites in a website hosting account from our firm, you will not need to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMes. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on each drive and after that a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and in case a corrupted file is identified, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your information will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we keep all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In case there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens instantly, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.