The process of files getting corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There're different fail-safes, still often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. As a result, a damaged file will be treated as a good one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. Once some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your content. Although the most popular server file systems have various checks, they are likely to fail to discover a problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time to be able to check all of the files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive is corrupted for some reason, however, it's likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because alternative file systems do not include special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single 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 will be replaced with a good one from another hard drive. Since this happens instantly, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

You will not have to deal with any silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you buy one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions since the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file saved on a server. Since we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In the event that 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 possibility of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard drives. ZFS is the only file system you can get that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which are unable to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.