Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various software or hardware fails. The moment a file is corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are more likely to happen on bigger hard disks where significant volumes of information are stored. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that operate on web servers these days often are unable to locate corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. Most web hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. In case a file on a drive gets corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it's likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because other file systems do not feature special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If 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 drive. Since this happens right away, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You will not encounter any kind of silent data corruption issues should you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server plans because the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to guarantee that all of your files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file saved on a server. As we store all content on a number of 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. If 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 chance of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the rest of the drives. ZFS is the only file system you will find that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are unable to detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across drives.