Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the losing of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer display an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since 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 admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all the other drives and the damage will be long term. Many widespread file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on web hosting servers where huge amounts of information are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared website hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most internet hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive gets damaged for some reason, yet, it is likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since alternative file systems don't include special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and 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 hard disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you buy one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you will not need to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system which monitors all 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. That file will be synchronized between multiple SSD drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and in case it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens right away, so there will be no danger for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, alternative file systems perform checks after a system breakdown, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the remaining drives as well and you may lose critical information. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of every single file you upload no matter what.