The process of files being damaged because of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which hosting companies face since 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 several fail-safes, still often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see a thing. Consequently, a damaged file will be treated as a good one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. Once some file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present 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 popular server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to find a problem early enough or require a long time period to be able to check all files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
If you host your Internet sites in a shared website hosting account from our firm, you will not have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform employs the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All information that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple SSD drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this type of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This may happen throughout the writing process on each drive and after that a bad copy can be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all of the drives immediately and in the event that a corrupted file is discovered, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your data will stay unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We've avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its main advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we store all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. When there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following an unexpected power loss, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.