The process of files getting damaged resulting from some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more information is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are several fail-safes, still often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see anything. Because of this, a damaged file will be handled as a good one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, which means that 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 sacrificing your website content. Although the most frequently used server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. The majority of web hosting service providers, like our firm, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, the same information is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive is damaged for some reason, yet, it's more than likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because other file systems do not feature special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy will be substituted with a good one from a different drive. Since this happens right away, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We have avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. When there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens right away, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our servers or that it could be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ such checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after a sudden electrical power failure, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS will not crash after a power loss and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.