The process of files getting corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that hosting companies face as the larger a hard drive is and the more information is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There're a couple of fail-safes, yet often the data gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect anything. Thus, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, so 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 shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to identify a problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all 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 will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive becomes corrupted for reasons unknown, yet, it's more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives as other file systems do not offer special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy shall be substituted with a good one from another hard disk drive. Since this happens instantly, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you go for one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you will not need to be concerned about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all of the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between a number of SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done right away, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, other file systems execute checks only after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you could lose precious information. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we're able to guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.