Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer present a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such an issue occurs and it is not noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the damage will become permanent. Many frequently used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on internet hosting servers where large amounts of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most hosting providers, including our firm, use multiple hard disks to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same info is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive gets damaged for some reason, yet, it's likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives since other file systems don't feature special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from a different hard disk. Since this happens immediately, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be resistant to silent data corruption since all of our storage servers make use of the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to ensure the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several redundant drives employed in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same across all drives. All copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies quickly, and if it detects a mismatch, that will indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it will substitute that file with a good copy from one of the other drives. Even if there's an unexpected power loss, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, prolonging the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the sole file system which can really protect your content from silent data corruption.