Data corruption is the damage of information due to various hardware or software failures. The moment a file gets damaged, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on larger in size hard disk drives where substantial volumes of information are kept. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the bad file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that operate on web servers these days often are not able to identify corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we employ on our cloud platform. The majority of web hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all the time. When a file on a drive is damaged for some reason, however, it's more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives since alternative file systems do not have special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from a different hard disk. Due to the fact that this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you go for one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you will not have to worry about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system which checks all files in real time. Every time 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 synced between several NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all 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 is done immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, other file systems perform checks after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they are unable to detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy can be replicated on the remaining disks as well and you could lose precious information. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we guarantee the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.