Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the losing of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly as its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer present an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. If such an issue appears and it isn't noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the harm will become long term. Many widely used file systems either don't have real-time checks or don't have good ones that can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of info are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared website 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 keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive is corrupted for some reason, however, it's likely that it will be copied on the other drives because alternative file systems do not have special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from another hard disk drive. Because this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you buy one of our semi-dedicated server solutions, you will not need to worry about silent file corruption as we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your web hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. This file will be synchronized between multiple NVMe drives for redundancy, so if a drive fails, the other ones will take over. ZFS compares the checksum of all of the copies on the different drives and when it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens immediately, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any time. In comparison, all the other file systems perform checks after a system failure, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums that ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy may be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you may lose precious information. Since this is not the case with ZFS, we're able to warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.