The process of files being damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems which web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You'll find a couple of fail-safes, still often the info becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. As a result, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most widely used server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast period of time in order to check all files and the server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. The majority of internet hosting suppliers, including our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. When a file on a drive is damaged for reasons unknown, however, it is very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because alternative file systems do not offer special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy will be substituted with a good one from another 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

We have avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system called ZFS. Its main 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. As we store all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In case there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens right away, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden blackout, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a blackout and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.