Data corruption is the damage of data due to various hardware or software problems. The moment a file is corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard drives where vast volumes of info are kept. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and it'll be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are unable to detect corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared web hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we employ on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting service providers, like our firm, use multiple HDDs to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, identical info is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for some reason, however, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives because other file systems do not include special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy shall be swapped with a good one from another hard drive. Due to the fact that this happens in real time, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages, you won't need to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system which checks all the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between several SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This is done in real time, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. In contrast, alternative file systems carry out checks after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you could lose critical info. As this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to guarantee the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.