Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and as a consequence, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case such a problem appears and it is not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will be permanent. Many commonly used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. The vast majority of hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same info is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive becomes damaged for reasons unknown, yet, it's very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives since other file systems do not have special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from another hard disk drive. Because this happens right away, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system named ZFS. Its key advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on numerous SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens in real time, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this type of checks and what is more, even during a file system check after a sudden power loss, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS does not crash after an electrical power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.