Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software failures. The moment a file is corrupted, it will no longer work accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as fails are very likely to happen on larger hard drives where substantial volumes of information are located. When a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and will be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers these days often are not able to discover corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new website hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of hosting providers, like our company, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. In case a file on a drive becomes corrupted for some reason, however, it's very likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because other file systems don't feature special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy shall be replaced with a good one from another hard disk. Due to the fact that this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You will not have to deal with any silent data corruption issues if you purchase one of our semi-dedicated server solutions due to the fact that the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums 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 stored on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. If 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 without delay, avoiding any chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the rest of the drives. ZFS is the sole file system out there which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which are not able to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.