Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software fails. Once a file gets damaged, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are more likely to happen on bigger hard disks where significant volumes of information are kept. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which run on web servers nowadays often are unable to recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud web hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting providers, like our company, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive is corrupted for whatever reason, yet, it's likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because other file systems do not offer special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy shall be swapped with a good one from another drive. As this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You won't encounter any silent data corruption issues should you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages because the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all of your files are undamaged at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file kept on a server. As we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. When 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 sole file system you can get that uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which cannot detect silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.