The process of files getting corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is known 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 data is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find various fail-safes, but often the information is corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice anything. Because of this, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. The moment a file gets damaged, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most frequently used server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to find a problem early enough or require a vast amount of time in order to check all the files and the hosting server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we employ on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting suppliers, including our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, yet, it is very likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as other file systems don't offer special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from a different hard disk. As this happens instantly, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You will not need to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues if you buy one of our semi-dedicated server plans since the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to guarantee that all files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Because we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. When 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 without delay, avoiding any probability of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the remaining drives. ZFS is the sole file system you will find which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which cannot identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.