The process of files being damaged due to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You'll find different fail-safes, yet often the information gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most widespread server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to identify a problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time to be able to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on our cloud hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one on the market that checks all the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the other SSDs. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You will not need to deal with any silent data corruption issues in case you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions as the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all files are undamaged all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard drives. ZFS is the sole file system you can find which uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems that cannot detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.