Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and due to this fact, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, and so on. If this kind of a problem appears and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Numerous popular file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on internet hosting servers where substantial amounts of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting suppliers, like our firm, use multiple hard disks to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same data is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive is damaged for whatever reason, yet, it's more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives since alternative file systems don't offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from a different hard drive. Due to the fact that this happens in real time, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any possibility of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for every single file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the remaining drives and the one it has stored. In case there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and because it happens instantly, there's no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our web servers or that it could be copied to the other hard disks in the RAID. None of the other file systems use such checks and furthermore, even during a file system check right after an unexpected power failure, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS does not crash after a blackout and the continual checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unnecessary.