The process of files getting corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more information is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're a couple of fail-safes, but often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see a thing. Thus, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most frequently used server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to find a problem early enough or require a long time period to check all the files and the server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The majority of hosting providers, including our firm, use multiple hard disks to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all the time. When a file on a drive becomes corrupted for reasons unknown, yet, it's likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as other file systems do not offer special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from another hard disk. As this happens instantly, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You won't have to deal with any silent data corruption issues should you get one of our semi-dedicated server packages due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all of your files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file stored on a server. As we store all content on a number of drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the sole file system you will find that uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems that are not able to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.