The process of files getting corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems which web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more information is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find a couple of fail-safes, still often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice anything. Thus, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk is 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 worse. When some file gets damaged, it will be partly 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, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most well-known server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to identify a problem early enough or require a vast period of time to be able to check all of the files and the server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

We have resolved the issue of silent data corruption on our cloud web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one on the market that checks all files in real time by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.