The process of files getting damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find a couple of fail-safes, yet often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect anything. As a result, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. When a file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most frequently used server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast time period to check all files and the 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 shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The majority of hosting suppliers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same information is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive gets damaged for some reason, however, it's more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives since other file systems do not have special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In case a file gets corrupted, 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 another hard disk. As this happens instantly, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we store all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check right after a sudden power failure, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.