The process of files getting corrupted as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find several fail-safes, but often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Because of this, a bad file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. Once a file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most widely used server file systems include various checks, they often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a vast time period to check all of the files and the web hosting server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it's likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because alternative file systems do not include special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy shall be swapped with a good one from another drive. As this happens immediately, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever get damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its main advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. If there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens in real time, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use such checks and what is more, even during a file system check after a sudden power loss, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a power loss and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.