Data corruption is the damage of information because of various software or hardware failures. After a file gets damaged, it will no longer function properly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are much more likely to occur on larger hard disks where considerable volumes of information are stored. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and it'll be duplicated on all the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers these days often are not able to discover corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be protected against silent data corruption since all of our storage servers make use of the efficient ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it employs checksums, or digital identifiers, to guarantee the integrity of each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be saved on several redundant drives operating in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same across all disk drives. All copies of a specific file will have the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the copies quickly, so if it registers a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is corrupted, it'll substitute that file with a good copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unforeseen blackout, the data on the servers will not be corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some breakdown, lengthening the time needed for the server to go back online. ZFS is the only file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.