Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and for that reason, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. When this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all of the other drives and the harm will be permanent. Many widely used file systems either don't have real-time checks or don't have good ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on hosting servers where large amounts of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all of our shared hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you buy one of our semi-dedicated server plans, you won't need to be concerned about silent data corruption since we use ZFS - a high level file system which checks all of the files in real time. Each time you upload a file to your website hosting account, ZFS will assign a unique digital fingerprint to it - the so-called checksum. The file will be synchronized between a number of 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 if it detects a corrupted copy, it replaces it with a healthy one from a different drive. This happens in real time, so there will be no threat for any part of your content at any moment. In contrast, all of the other file systems perform checks only after a system breakdown, but since they don't use anything similar to the checksums which ZFS uses, they can't detect silently corrupted files, so a corrupted copy may be replicated on the remaining drives as well and you may lose important info. As this isn't the case with ZFS, we warrant the integrity of each file you upload no matter what.