The process of files getting damaged as a result of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more info is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You will find different fail-safes, yet often the data is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see a thing. Because of this, a bad file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. When a file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most commonly used server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to identify a problem early enough or require a long time period to check all the files and the hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we make use of on our cloud platform. Most of the internet hosting service providers, including our firm, use multiple HDDs to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive becomes damaged for reasons unknown, yet, it's likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as alternative file systems do not have special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from another hard disk drive. As this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you buy one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't have to worry about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system that keeps track of all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between a couple of SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, other file systems execute checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you may lose crucial data. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we guarantee the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.