The process of files being corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more information is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, still often the info gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins notice anything. Consequently, a damaged file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. Once a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer 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 content. Although the most widely used server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a long period of time to be able to check all the files and the server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting suppliers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive becomes damaged for some reason, however, it is very likely that it will be copied on the other drives as alternative file systems don't have 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 will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the bad copy will be substituted with a good one from a different hard disk. Because this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be resistant to silent data corruption since all of our storage servers make use of the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to guarantee the integrity of every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on several redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same on all disks. All of the copies of a given file will feature the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, and if it finds a mismatch, that would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll replace that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unexpected blackout, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check which other file systems perform after some breakdown, prolonging the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the sole file system that can really protect your content from silent data corruption.