The process of files being corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems that hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You will find several fail-safes, yet often the data is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see anything. Consequently, a corrupted file will be handled as a good one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. Once a file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most popular server file systems have various checks, they often fail to find a problem early enough or require a long period of time in order to check all of the files and the web hosting server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we make use of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple HDDs to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive becomes corrupted for whatever reason, however, it's likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since alternative file systems do not feature special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy shall be swapped with a good one from a different disk drive. Since this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption since all our storage servers work with the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to guarantee the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on a couple of redundant drives working in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same on all drives. All of the copies of a given file will have the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, and if it identifies a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it will substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there's an unexpected power loss, the data on the servers will not become corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform after some malfunction, lengthening the time needed for the server to return online. ZFS is the only file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.