The process of files getting 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 since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find various fail-safes, still often the info becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see anything. Thus, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. Once a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most frequently used server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to identify some problem early enough or require an extensive period of time in order to check all 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 which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. The majority of hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives at all times. When a file on a drive becomes damaged for whatever reason, yet, it is likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because alternative file systems do not offer special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy shall be swapped with a good one from a different hard disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens in real time, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You will not experience any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever should you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans since the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all of the files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file stored on a server. As we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, 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 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 probability of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the remaining drives. ZFS is the sole file system out there that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which are unable to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.