The process of files getting damaged as a consequence of 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 data is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are various fail-safes, still often the information becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see a thing. Thus, a bad file will be handled as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. Once a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most well-known server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to discover some problem early enough or require an extensive period of time to check all of the files and the web hosting server will not be functional 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 will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. The majority of hosting suppliers, like 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 the time. When a file on a drive becomes corrupted for some reason, yet, it's more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because other file systems don't have special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS uses 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 will be swapped with a good one from a different drive. As this happens immediately, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. In case there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can 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 use this kind of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after an unexpected power failure, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.