The process of files getting corrupted as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more data is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You'll find several fail-safes, yet often the data is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice anything. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a good one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. Once some file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most widely used server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to discover a problem early enough or require a long time period in order to check all the files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
We guarantee the integrity of the info uploaded in any website hosting account that is created on our cloud platform since we use the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only one which was designed to avoid silent data corruption through a unique checksum for every single file. We'll store your information on multiple NVMe drives that work in a RAID, so exactly the same files will be available on several places at the same time. ZFS checks the digital fingerprint of all of the files on all drives in real time and in case the checksum of any file is different from what it should be, the file system replaces that file with an undamaged copy from another drive in the RAID. No other file system uses checksums, so it is possible for data to get silently damaged and the bad file to be duplicated on all drives with time, but since that can never happen on a server running ZFS, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your data.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption since all of our storage servers work with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, so as to verify the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be kept on a couple of redundant drives operating in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disks. All copies of a given file will have the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies right away, so if it finds a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll replace that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's a sudden power failure, the data on the servers will not become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, lengthening the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.