The process of files getting damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems which 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 will find a couple of fail-safes, yet often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see a thing. As a result, a damaged file will be treated as a standard one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. Once a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, which means that 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 shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your website content. Although the most widespread server file systems have various checks, they often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a long amount of time to be able to check all files and the server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our shared website hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the other SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be resistant to silent data corruption because all our storage servers employ the efficient ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to verify the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on several redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same across all disks. All copies of a particular file will have the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, so if it finds a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll substitute that file with a good copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's an unexpected power loss, the data on the servers won't get corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some malfunction, extending the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the sole file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.