The process of files being corrupted owing to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more information is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are several fail-safes, but often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. Consequently, a corrupted file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all files and the web server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple hard disks to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, identical data is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive becomes corrupted for whatever reason, yet, it's more than likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as alternative file systems do not have special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy shall be swapped 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
In case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you will not have to worry about silent file corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system which checks all 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 a number of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and if it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, all the other file systems perform checks after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the other disks as well and you could lose precious data. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.