The process of files being damaged because of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems which hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more information is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There're a couple of fail-safes, still often the info is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect anything. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a good one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or fully 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 will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most well-known server file systems have various checks, they are likely to fail to discover some problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all of the files and the web server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of hosting providers, including our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, identical data is synchronized between the drives at all times. When a file on a drive becomes corrupted for some reason, however, it is more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives since alternative file systems do not feature special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the bad copy shall be swapped with a good one from another hard disk. As this happens immediately, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You won't encounter any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server plans due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file saved on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on a number of drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the rest of the drives. ZFS is the sole file system available on the market which uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems that are not able to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.