The process of files getting damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more data is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're different fail-safes, still often the info becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. Consequently, a damaged file will be handled as a good one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When a file gets damaged, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your website content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast time period to be able to check all 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 hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same info is synchronized between the drives at all times. When a file on a drive is damaged for reasons unknown, yet, it is very likely that it will be copied on the other drives because alternative file systems don't feature special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy shall be replaced with a good one from another hard disk drive. Because this happens right away, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you buy one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you will not need to worry about silent file corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system which checks all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done in real time, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, alternative file systems carry out checks after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the remaining drives as well and you could lose crucial info. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.