Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and because of this, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer display a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If such an issue occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all other drives and the damage will become long term. A number of widely used file systems either do not have real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on hosting servers where substantial amounts of data are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new web hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the same data is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive gets damaged for some reason, however, it is likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because other file systems don't include special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from another hard disk. As this happens in real time, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you buy one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you won't need to worry about silent data corruption because we use ZFS - an advanced file system which monitors all files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between a number of NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all copies on the different drives and if 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 risk for any part of your content at any moment. In comparison, alternative file systems carry out checks only after a system failure, but since they do not use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the other drives as well and you can lose crucial data. Because this is not the case with ZFS, we warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.