Data corruption is the damage of information due to various hardware or software failures. When a file gets damaged, it will no longer function as it should, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as failures are much more likely to happen on larger hard disks where large volumes of information are stored. If a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a good one and it will be copied on all drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems that operate on web servers nowadays often are not able to recognize corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. The vast majority of hosting service providers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, the same information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. In case a file on a drive gets corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it is more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because alternative file systems do not have special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS applies 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 damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from another drive. As this happens right away, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
We've avoided any probability of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created take advantage of a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. Since we keep all content on numerous NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the other drives and the one it has saved. When there is a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since it happens right away, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our website hosting servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and what is more, even during a file system check following a sudden power failure, none of them will discover silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS doesn't crash after a power loss and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.