The process of files getting damaged due to 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 placed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find a couple of fail-safes, still often the info gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins notice a thing. Because of this, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. Once a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most well-known server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to find a problem early enough or require a long period of time in order to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. Most hosting suppliers, like our firm, use multiple hard disks to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives at all times. When a file on a drive gets damaged for reasons unknown, however, it's likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as alternative file systems do not offer special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different hard drive. Because this happens instantly, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could 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 such checks and in addition, even during a file system check right after an unexpected power failure, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.