The process of files being damaged because of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face as the larger a hard drive is and the more info is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You will find a couple of fail-safes, yet often the information gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see a thing. As a result, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When some file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, which means that 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 will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your website content. Although the most frequently used server file systems include various checks, they often fail to detect some problem early enough or require a long time period in order to check all of the files and the web server will not be operational 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 ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. The majority of web hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, however, it is likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since other file systems do not include special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy will be substituted with a good one from a different hard disk drive. Since this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you purchase one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you will not need to worry about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system which monitors all of the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done in real time, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, other file systems execute checks only after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the rest of the disks as well and you can lose important info. Since this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.