The process of files being corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more data is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find several fail-safes, still often the data is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see a thing. Thus, a bad file will be treated as a good one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your website content. Although the most popular server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to find some problem early enough or require an extensive period of time in order to check all the files and the hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. Most hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple HDDs to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, yet, it's more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as other file systems do not offer special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from another hard disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens instantly, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we store all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens right away, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check after a sudden blackout, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.