Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file could become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer display an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. If such an issue occurs and it is not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all other drives and the harm will be permanent. Many popular file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where huge volumes of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

You won't need to deal with any silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you get one of our semi-dedicated server packages as the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums in order to guarantee that all the files are intact at all times. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is allotted to each and every file saved on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file has the same checksum on all drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives right away. If it detects that a file is corrupted and its checksum is different from what it has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the corrupted copy to be synchronized on the rest of the hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you can get which uses checksums, which makes it much more dependable than other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across drives.