The process of files getting corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more information is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find various fail-safes, still often the info gets corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see anything. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. Once a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most frequently used server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to discover some problem early enough or require an extensive period of time in order to check all files and the web server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a web hosting account with our company, you don't have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform employs the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All the data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous SSDs. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This may occur throughout the writing process on each drive and afterwards a bad copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives instantly and if a corrupted file is discovered, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your information will remain intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you purchase one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you will not need to worry about silent file corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system which checks all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between a number of SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done instantly, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, other file systems execute checks after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you can lose crucial information. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.