The process of files being damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more information is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, yet often the information is damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Thus, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When some file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most popular server file systems include various checks, they often fail to find a problem early enough or require a long time period to be able to check all the files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.

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 make use of on our cloud platform. Most internet hosting providers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive is damaged for whatever reason, yet, it is very likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since other file systems don't offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In the event that 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 substituted with a good one from another hard drive. Since this happens immediately, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of SSD 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 saved. In the event that there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because it happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and in addition, even during a file system check after an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.