Data corruption is the unintentional 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 result, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer present a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. When this kind of an issue occurs and it is not found by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all the other drives and the damage will become long term. Many widely used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on web hosting servers where large volumes of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new website hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting suppliers, like our firm, use multiple hard disks to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive is corrupted for whatever reason, yet, it is very likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since alternative file systems don't feature special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS applies 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, which means that the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from a different disk drive. Since this happens immediately, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You will not encounter any silent data corruption issues if you obtain one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions since the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all of the files are undamaged all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is allotted to each and every file saved on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. In the event that it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the rest of the drives. ZFS is the sole file system available on the market that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems which are unable to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.