The process of files being damaged caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find a couple of fail-safes, still often the information is damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see anything. Because of this, a bad file will be treated as a good one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. When some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your website content. Although the most commonly used server file systems include various checks, they frequently fail to find a problem early enough or require a long period of time to be able to check all files and the hosting server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we make use of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of internet hosting providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, the exact same info is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive is damaged for reasons unknown, however, it is very likely that it will be copied on the other drives as alternative file systems do not have special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy will be replaced with a good one from another drive. As this happens immediately, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be protected against silent data corruption because all of our storage servers use the effective ZFS file system. What makes the latter unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to guarantee the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be kept on a couple of redundant drives in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same across all drives. All the copies of a specific file will feature the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies quickly, and if it detects a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace that file with a good copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unforeseen blackout, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, lengthening the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the sole file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.