Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and due to this fact, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If this kind of an issue occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. Many widely used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of data are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud hosting
account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, the same data is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive becomes damaged for some reason, however, it's very likely that it will be copied on the other drives since other file systems do not include special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different disk drive. As this happens right away, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We have avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently because the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting
account will be created work with a powerful file system called ZFS. Its key advantage over alternative file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each and every file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. As we keep all content on multiple SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. If there is a mismatch, the bad copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and since this happens instantly, there's no chance that a corrupted 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 use such checks and what's more, even during a file system check following a sudden power loss, none of them can find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS won't crash after a power loss and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.