The process of files being damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You can find a couple of fail-safes, still often the data becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Because of this, a corrupted file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. The moment some file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most frequently used server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to discover a problem early enough or require a long amount of time to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it's very likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since other file systems do not offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy will be substituted with a good one from a different hard disk drive. As this happens instantly, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You will not experience any silent data corruption issues should you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server plans because the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all the files are undamaged all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is allotted to each and every file stored on a server. As 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. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the other hard disks. ZFS is the sole file system you will find which uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems that are not able to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.