Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all other drives and the damage will be permanent. Numerous frequently used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have good ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where large volumes of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new web hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting suppliers, including our firm, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. When a file on a drive becomes damaged for whatever reason, yet, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives since alternative file systems don't have special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the bad copy shall be swapped with a good one from another disk drive. 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 Servers
We've avoided any possibility of files getting damaged silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system named ZFS. Its main advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has saved. When there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens instantly, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our servers or that it can be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems work with such checks and furthermore, even during a file system check following a sudden electrical power failure, none of them will identify silently corrupted files. In contrast, ZFS doesn't crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unnecessary.