The process of files being corrupted owing to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems which hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more data is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are different fail-safes, still often the information gets corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice anything. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. When a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most popular server file systems include various checks, they frequently fail to identify a problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time to be able to check all the files and the server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we employ on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard disks to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, identical data is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for whatever reason, however, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives since other file systems do not offer special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from a different drive. Since this happens right away, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We have avoided any chance of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system named ZFS. Its advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we store all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. When there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens in real time, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web servers or that it could be duplicated to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following an unexpected blackout, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a blackout and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.