The process of files being damaged as a result of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more information is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You'll find a couple of fail-safes, but often the data gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect anything. Because of this, a bad file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. When a file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, which means that 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 losing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they often fail to detect a problem early enough or require a long period of time in order to check all of the files and the web server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've resolved the problem of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the cutting-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced promptly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you will not have to worry about silent file corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system which keeps track of all of the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between a couple of 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 if it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens right away, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. In comparison, other file systems perform checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you could lose precious data. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.