Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and due to this fact, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly as its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. If this kind of a problem occurs and it isn't identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all other drives and the harm will become long term. A number of widely used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on internet hosting servers where large amounts of data are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. The vast majority of internet hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive is corrupted for whatever reason, however, it is more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as alternative file systems do not offer special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS works with 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, so the bad copy will be substituted with a good one from a different hard disk. Since this happens instantly, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system called ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. Since we store all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has stored. In case there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that it happens instantly, there's no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our hosting servers or that it could be copied to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after an unexpected power failure, none of them can identify silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.