The process of files being damaged as a result 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 since the larger a hard disk is and the more info is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find several fail-safes, yet often the information becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see anything. Consequently, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. The moment some file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most well-known server file systems have various checks, they often fail to find some problem early enough or require a long amount of time in order to check all the files and the web 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 will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting service providers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, the same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive becomes corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it's likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because alternative file systems don't feature special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the bad copy shall be swapped with a good one from another hard disk drive. Because this happens immediately, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You will not encounter any silent data corruption issues if you get one of our semi-dedicated server solutions due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all of the files are undamaged all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is allotted to each and every file stored on a server. As we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In case 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 chance of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you will find which uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems that are unable to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.