The process of files being damaged because of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems which Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more data is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There're several fail-safes, still often the data gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. Consequently, a damaged file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. Once a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your content. Although the most frequently used server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to detect a problem early enough or require an extensive period of time to be able to check all files and the hosting server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on our shared website hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems since it is the only one out there which checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud 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 Servers
We have avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we save all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. When there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens instantly, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after a sudden electrical power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.