The process of files getting damaged because of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You will find several fail-safes, still often the information gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see anything. As a result, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will not 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, so you risk losing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they often fail to detect some problem early enough or require a vast period of time to be able to check all of the files and the hosting server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
We have tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there that checks all files immediately 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 NVMe drives and regularly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly 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 rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be resistant to silent data corruption as all of our storage servers use the effective ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to ensure the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be saved on a couple of redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all drives. All copies of a given file will have the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, and if it discovers a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace 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 be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform after some breakdown, lengthening the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.