The process of files getting corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more info is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You'll find a couple of fail-safes, but often the data is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins notice a thing. Because of this, a damaged file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. The moment a file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to detect a problem early enough or require an extensive time period to be able to check all the files and the server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
In case you host your sites in a cloud hosting account with our company, you don't have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform works with the revolutionary ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different SSDs. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on any drive and afterwards a damaged copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all of the drives live and in the event that a corrupted file is discovered, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your info will stay undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You won't have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever if you get one of our semi-dedicated server plans since the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all the files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file kept on a server. Because we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. In the event that 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 probability of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard drives. ZFS is the only file system available on the market that uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which are not able to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.