The process of files getting corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is known as 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 more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find different fail-safes, still often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. Consequently, a damaged file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. Once some file gets corrupted, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they frequently fail to discover a problem early enough or require a long time period to be able to check all the files and the hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all of our cloud hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems because it is the only one on the market that checks all the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synced 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 damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory 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. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we save all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following a sudden power loss, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.