Data corruption is the damage of data because of various hardware or software fails. Once a file is damaged, it will no longer function as it should, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are very likely to occur on larger hard drives where substantial volumes of info are placed. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and will be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers nowadays often are not able to locate corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting service providers, including our firm, use multiple hard disks to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive becomes corrupted for some reason, however, it's likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as alternative file systems don't include special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from another drive. Since this happens in real time, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't have to be concerned about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - a high level file system that checks all files in real time. Whenever 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 synced between multiple NVMe drives for redundancy, so if one drive fails, the other ones will take control. ZFS compares the checksum of all the copies on the different drives and if it detects a damaged copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens right away, so there will be no danger 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 which ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a bad copy could be replicated on the rest of the drives as well and you could lose precious data. Because this isn't the case with ZFS, we can warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.