The process of files being corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more info is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, but often the information gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see anything. Consequently, a damaged file will be handled as a good one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely 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 losing your website content. Although the most widespread server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to identify some problem early enough or require a vast amount of time in order to check all files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all our cloud hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the other SSDs. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you obtain one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages, you won't need to worry about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system that monitors all files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between a number of SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done right away, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, alternative file systems perform checks only after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the other disks as well and you may lose important information. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.