Data corruption is the damage of info due to various hardware or software problems. Once a file gets damaged, it will no longer work accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file could be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard disks where considerable volumes of information are placed. If a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and will be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often are not able to identify corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
If you host your sites in a shared hosting account from our company, you do not have to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform employs the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of SSD drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This can occur throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all of the drives immediately and when a corrupted file is located, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your information will continue to be intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you purchase one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, you won't need to worry about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - an advanced file system that checks all of the files in real time. Whenever you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synced between multiple SSD drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and when it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from another drive. This is done right away, so there will be no risk for any part of your content at any time. By comparison, all the other file systems execute checks only after a system malfunction, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they will not detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy could be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you could lose crucial information. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we are able to warrant the integrity of each and every file you upload no matter what.