The process of files being damaged owing to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems which hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more data is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You'll find different fail-safes, but often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see anything. Thus, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not 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 losing your website content. Although the most frequently used server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to check all of the files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we make use of on our cloud platform. Most internet hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive gets damaged for some reason, yet, it is more than likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since other file systems do not feature special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from another hard drive. Since this happens right away, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you get one of our semi-dedicated server packages, you won't need to worry about silent data corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system which keeps track of all the files in real time. Every time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. That file will be synced between a couple of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and if it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done instantly, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, all of the other file systems carry out checks after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the other drives as well and you could lose crucial data. As this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.