Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file could become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should as its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, and so on. When this kind of a problem appears and it's not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Numerous popular file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on hosting servers where huge amounts of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple HDDs to store content and since the drives work in a RAID, the same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for whatever reason, however, it's more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives because other file systems don't include special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different disk drive. As this happens in real time, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You will not have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues should you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server packages since the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to ensure that all files are undamaged at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is assigned to each and every file kept on a server. Due to the fact that we store all content on multiple drives at the same time, the same file uses the same checksum on all of the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. In the event that it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it should be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy without delay, avoiding any chance of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you can get that uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems which are unable to detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.