Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly as its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. When such a problem occurs and it isn't found by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all the other drives and the harm will be long term. A large number of commonly used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on internet hosting servers where large amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new web hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive gets damaged for reasons unknown, however, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives because other file systems do not have special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from another hard disk. As this happens instantly, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You won't encounter any kind of silent data corruption issues should you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server packages due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all of the files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file stored on a server. Because we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the 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 without delay, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the sole file system out there that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which cannot detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.