Data corruption is the damage of data because of various hardware or software fails. When a file is damaged, it will no longer work accurately, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on bigger hard disks where considerable volumes of info are located. When a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers these days often are not able to discover corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting service providers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive becomes damaged for reasons unknown, however, it is very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as other file systems don't feature special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different disk drive. Since this happens instantly, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You won't encounter any silent data corruption issues in case you buy one of our semi-dedicated server solutions because the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Because we store all content on a number of drives simultaneously, the same file has the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In the event that it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the only file system on the market which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which are not able to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.