The process of files being corrupted as a result of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems which hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find several fail-safes, but often the information gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Thus, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to detect a problem early enough or require a long 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 Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. The majority of internet 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 of the time. When a file on a drive becomes damaged for some reason, however, it's very likely that it will be copied on the other drives since other file systems do not include special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different hard drive. Due to the fact that this happens immediately, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we save all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has saved. In case there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check after an unexpected blackout, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after an electrical power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.