The process of files getting corrupted owing to some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, but often the data is damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. As a result, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your content. Although the most widespread server file systems have various checks, they often fail to identify a problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to check all files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. Most web hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard disks to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive is damaged for some reason, yet, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives as alternative file systems don't offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the bad copy shall be substituted with a good one from another disk drive. Since this happens right away, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you get one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you will not have to worry about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system which monitors all of the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between a couple of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and in case it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens in real time, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, other file systems perform checks after a system malfunction, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy can be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you can lose precious information. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.