Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work properly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer present 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. In case this kind of an issue appears and it isn't recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Many commonly used file systems either do not 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 rather common issue on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive is corrupted for some reason, however, it is very likely that it will be copied on the other drives as other file systems don't include special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy will be substituted with a good one from a different hard disk drive. As this happens in real time, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You will not experience any silent data corruption issues in case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans since the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all the files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is allotted to each and every file kept on a server. Since we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. In the event that 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 probability of the bad copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard disks. ZFS is the only file system out there that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.