The process of files getting damaged because of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems which web hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more info is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, yet often the data gets damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. As a result, a bad file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. When a file gets damaged, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems include various checks, they frequently fail to discover some problem early enough or require an extensive period of time in order to check all the files and the server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard disks to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive becomes corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it is likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as alternative file systems don't include special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different hard drive. As this happens right away, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we save all content on a number of 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. If there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following a sudden electrical power failure, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a blackout and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check obsolete.