The process of files getting corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more information is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find different fail-safes, but often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins notice anything. Because of this, a damaged file will be handled as a good one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall 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 find a problem early enough or require a long time period to be able to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all of our cloud website hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all files immediately by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced instantly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the other SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you will not have to be concerned about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - a high level file system that keeps track of all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between a number of SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, other file systems execute checks after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you can lose precious information. As this is not the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.