Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and due to this fact, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function properly as its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. When this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't found by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will be long term. A large number of commonly used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
We warrant the integrity of the information uploaded in every single hosting account which is created on our cloud platform as we use the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only one which was designed to avert silent data corruption thanks to a unique checksum for each and every file. We will store your information on a large number of NVMe drives which work in a RAID, so the exact same files will be accessible on several places concurrently. ZFS checks the digital fingerprint of all of the files on all the drives in real time and in the event that the checksum of any file differs from what it should be, the file system replaces that file with an undamaged version from some other drive in the RAID. There's no other file system that uses checksums, so it is possible for data to be silently corrupted and the bad file to be replicated on all drives with time, but since this can never happen on a server using ZFS, you will not have to concern yourself with the integrity of your data.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You will not have to deal with any silent data corruption issues should you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting plans since the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to make sure that all the files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is allotted to each and every file saved on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. When it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the only file system available on the market that uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which are unable to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.