The process of files being damaged owing to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more info is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There're different fail-safes, still often the data is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice anything. Thus, a corrupted file will be treated as a standard one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. When a file gets corrupted, 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 mix 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 popular server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to discover a problem early enough or require a vast period of time to check all of the files and the web server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared website hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The majority of internet hosting suppliers, like our firm, use multiple HDDs to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. When a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, however, it's more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because alternative file systems do not include special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from a different hard disk. Due to the fact that this happens instantly, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created use a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we store all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. If there's a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens in real time, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check following an unexpected power failure, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.