The process of files getting corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems that hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find various fail-safes, but often the information is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice anything. Consequently, a damaged file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to detect some problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time to check all the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared web hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard disks to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive is damaged for some reason, however, it is more than likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because other file systems do not offer special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the bad copy shall be swapped with a good one from a different hard disk. Because this happens instantly, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever be damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you get one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you won't need to worry about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system that keeps track of all of the files in real time. Every 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 synchronized between multiple NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and if it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens right away, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any time. In comparison, all the other file systems perform checks after a system malfunction, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they won't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you may lose important information. As this is not the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.