Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such an issue occurs and it's not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all of the other drives and the harm will be permanent. A large number of widespread file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on web hosting servers where large amounts of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
In case you host your websites in a cloud web hosting account from our company, you will not need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform uses the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All the info that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of SSD drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on any drive and then a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives live and if a corrupted file is found, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your info will stay undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its main advantage over other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we save all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. In case there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because it happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy could remain on our web servers or that it could be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with this type of checks and furthermore, even during a file system check after an unexpected power failure, none of them can detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after an electrical power failure and the continual checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.