The process of files being corrupted because of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that Internet hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find several fail-safes, still often the information is corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Thus, a corrupted file will be handled as a good one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even 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 combination 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 widely used server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to detect some problem early enough or require an extensive period of time in order to check all the files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all of the files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You will not need to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues should you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans as the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to guarantee that all of the files are undamaged at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file saved on a server. Since we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. In the event that it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the other hard disks. ZFS is the only file system on the market which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which are not able to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.