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 hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more data is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find different fail-safes, still often the data is corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice a thing. Thus, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random mix 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 commonly used server file systems have various checks, they are likely to fail to detect some problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all of the files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

If you host your sites in a hosting account with our firm, you won't have 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 outstanding ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any kind of data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMe drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This can happen during the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged copy can be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all the drives right away and in the event that a corrupted file is identified, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your information will remain undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you get one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you will not need to worry about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - a high level file system which checks all files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synchronized between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, other file systems execute checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the other drives as well and you could lose important information. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we're able to guarantee the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.