The process of files being corrupted as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more information is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find several fail-safes, but often the data is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be treated as a standard one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. Once a file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will not 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, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most well-known server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to detect some problem early enough or require a vast period of time in order to check all the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you buy one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you won't have to be concerned about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system that monitors all files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced 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 time. In contrast, alternative file systems execute checks after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the other drives as well and you could lose important data. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.