The process of files being corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are various fail-safes, yet often the info is corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Thus, a damaged file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. Once a file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most widely used server file systems include various checks, they often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a long period of time in order to check all of the files and the server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

In case you host your sites in a web hosting account with our company, you don't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMe drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on each drive and after that a bad copy can be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and in case a corrupted file is located, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your data will continue to be intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You won't experience any kind of silent data corruption issues should you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server solutions because the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all the files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the other hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you will find which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.