The process of files being damaged as a result of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more info is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There're various fail-safes, still often the data gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to detect a problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all the files and the web server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all of the files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You won't need to deal with any silent data corruption issues whatsoever if you buy one of our semi-dedicated server packages since the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all of your files are undamaged all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file stored on a server. Because we store all content on a number of drives simultaneously, the same file has the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any possibility of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard disks. ZFS is the only file system available on the market which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.