The process of files getting corrupted as a result of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems which Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There're a couple of fail-safes, still often the information becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. As a result, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. Once a file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems have various checks, they are likely to fail to find a problem early enough or require a long time period in order 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
If you host your websites in a shared web hosting account from our company, you won't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform works with the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many SSD drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this type of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This may occur throughout the writing process on any drive and then a corrupted copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all drives immediately and when a corrupted file is located, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your data will stay unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you won't have to be concerned about silent file corruption since we use ZFS - an advanced file system which monitors all the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synchronized between a couple 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 happens right away, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, other file systems perform checks only after a system malfunction, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they cannot detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the other drives as well and you could lose crucial info. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.