The process of files getting damaged resulting from some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more info is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You will find a couple of fail-safes, yet often the data gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. Consequently, a bad file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. Once some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most frequently used server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to identify a problem early enough or require a long period of time in order to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. Most of the internet hosting service providers, like our company, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, the exact same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive becomes damaged for some reason, however, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives as alternative file systems do not offer special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from another drive. Because this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You will not encounter any silent data corruption issues should you buy one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions since the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all of the files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is allotted to each and every file saved on a server. Since we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In the event that it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any possibility of the bad copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the sole file system you can find which uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems that are not able to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.