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 hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find a couple of fail-safes, yet often the data is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. Thus, a damaged file will be treated as a good one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your site content. Although the most widespread server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to discover a problem early enough or require a long time period to be able to check all files and the web 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 that we employ on our cloud platform. Most of the internet hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same info is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive becomes damaged for whatever reason, yet, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives because other file systems don't have special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from another hard drive. As this happens instantly, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is 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 saved. When there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens instantly, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after an unexpected power loss, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS won't crash after a power loss and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.