Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and as a consequence, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly because its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such an issue appears and it isn't recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all the other drives and the harm will be long term. Many frequently used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on internet hosting servers where large amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. Most hosting providers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same info is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for whatever reason, however, it is very likely that it will be copied on the other drives since other file systems don't have special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy will be swapped with a good one from another hard disk. Since this happens instantly, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We have avoided any chance of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created use a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its main advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we store all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. If there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens right away, there's no chance that a damaged copy could remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include such checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after an unexpected electrical power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check obsolete.