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 web hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more info is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find various fail-safes, but often the info becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. Thus, a damaged file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your site content. Although the most frequently used server file systems feature various checks, they frequently fail to find a problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time in order to check all of the files and the server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. The majority of web hosting providers, including our firm, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. When a file on a drive gets damaged for reasons unknown, yet, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives as alternative file systems do not include special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from a different hard disk. Due to the fact that this happens instantly, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any probability of files getting damaged silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we store all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because this happens right away, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this kind of checks and what's more, even during a file system check following an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.