The process of files getting 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 drive is and the more info is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You'll find a couple of fail-safes, but often the info is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. As a result, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. When a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems feature various checks, they frequently fail to discover some problem early enough or require a vast period of time in order to check all the files and the 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 all of our cloud hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced instantly 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 copied on the other SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we keep all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens instantly, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check after a sudden blackout, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS won't crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.