The process of files being corrupted as a result of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find several fail-safes, yet often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Thus, a damaged file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard disk drive 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 reality the damage will be even worse. Once a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random blend 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 popular server file systems feature various checks, they frequently fail to find a problem early enough or require a long time period to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our shared web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one in existence which checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from some other 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 needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages, you will not have to be concerned about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - a high level file system which monitors all the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between multiple SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and if it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done instantly, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, alternative file systems perform checks only after a system malfunction, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you may lose important info. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.