The process of files being damaged caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more data is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, yet often the information is corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be treated as a good one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. When some file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most frequently used server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to identify a problem early enough or require a long time period in order to check all files and the server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting service providers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, identical info is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive becomes damaged for reasons unknown, yet, it's more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives as other file systems don't include special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy shall be substituted with a good one from another hard drive. As this happens in real time, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages, you will not need to be concerned about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system that checks all files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between a couple of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This happens instantly, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. By comparison, alternative file systems carry out checks after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you may lose critical information. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.