The process of files getting damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems which Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more information is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find various fail-safes, yet often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see anything. Consequently, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. Once some file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that 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 will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most popular server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all of the files and the hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we make use of on our cloud platform. Most web hosting service providers, like our company, use multiple HDDs to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive becomes corrupted for some reason, however, it's very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because other file systems do not feature special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In case 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 a different drive. Since this happens instantly, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You won't need to deal with any silent data corruption issues whatsoever if you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans because the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all the files are intact at all times. 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 multiple 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. In the event that 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 without delay, avoiding any probability of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you can find which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which are unable to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.