Data corruption is the damage of information because of various hardware or software failures. When a file is damaged, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as failures are more likely to occur on larger in size hard drives where substantial volumes of information are kept. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and it'll be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems which run on web servers nowadays often are not able to discover corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive becomes corrupted for whatever reason, yet, it's very likely that it will be copied on the other drives since alternative file systems don't include special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from another disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens immediately, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You won't have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever if you get one of our semi-dedicated server packages because the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all files are undamaged at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file kept on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. In case it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any possibility of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the other hard disks. ZFS is the sole file system out there that uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which cannot detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.