The process of files being corrupted because of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face since 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. There're several fail-safes, yet often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see a thing. Consequently, a corrupted file will be treated as a good one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present 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 frequently used server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to identify some problem early enough or require a vast amount 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

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we make use of on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting service providers, including our firm, use multiple hard disks to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for some reason, however, it is very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as other file systems do not include special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from a different hard disk. As this happens in real time, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You will not have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues in case you buy one of our semi-dedicated server plans as the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to guarantee that all the files are undamaged all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that 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 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 has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the remaining drives. ZFS is the only file system on the market which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which cannot identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.