The process of files being damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more info is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find several fail-safes, yet often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see anything. As a result, a bad file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. Once a file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your site content. Although the most widespread server file systems have various checks, they are likely to fail to discover a problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all the files and the web server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same info is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive becomes corrupted for whatever reason, however, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives as alternative file systems do not include special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, 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 a different disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens immediately, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't need to be concerned about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system which keeps track of 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. This 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 copies on the different drives and in case it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done instantly, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, alternative file systems perform checks only after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the other drives as well and you can lose crucial information. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.