The process of files getting damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're several fail-safes, but often the info gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. The moment a file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most frequently used server file systems include various checks, they often fail to detect some problem early enough or require an extensive time period to be able to check all files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

We have dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on all our website hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.