The process of files getting damaged caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that hosting companies face as the larger a hard drive is and the more information is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find several fail-safes, yet often the info is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. Because of this, a bad file will be treated as a good one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to find some problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all of the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new web hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we make use of on our cloud platform. The majority of web hosting providers, including our company, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives at all times. When a file on a drive is damaged for reasons unknown, however, it's very likely that it will be copied on the other drives as other file systems do not feature special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy will be replaced with a good one from a different hard drive. Due to the fact that this happens in real time, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We've avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on numerous 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 case there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following an unexpected blackout, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.