Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly because its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer show a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etcetera. When this kind of an issue appears and it's not noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all the other drives and the damage will be long term. A large number of frequently used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on internet hosting servers where substantial volumes of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we employ on our cloud platform. Most web hosting service providers, including our firm, use multiple hard disks to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, identical data is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive becomes corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it's more than likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since alternative file systems do not feature special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the bad copy shall be replaced with a good one from another disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens right away, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We have avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently due to the fact that the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that is checked in real time. As we keep all content on a number of NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive corresponds to the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. If there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and because it happens instantly, there's no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our web servers or that it could be duplicated to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems include this type of checks and what's more, even during a file system check right after a sudden power loss, none of them can discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after an electrical power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.