The process of files being corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more info is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find several fail-safes, still often the info gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Consequently, a damaged file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. Once some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most commonly used server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to discover a problem early enough or require a vast period of time to be able to check all of the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. Most of the internet hosting suppliers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive gets corrupted for reasons unknown, yet, it's likely that it will be copied on the other drives as alternative file systems do not feature special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy will be substituted with a good one from another hard drive. As this happens right away, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You won't encounter any silent data corruption issues whatsoever if you obtain one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans because the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is allotted to each and every file kept on a server. Since we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the other drives. ZFS is the sole file system available on the market which uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which are not able to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.