Data corruption is the damage of info due to various hardware or software failures. When a file gets damaged, it will no longer function properly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger hard drives where vast volumes of info are stored. If a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as a good one and it'll be duplicated on all drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems that run on web servers today often are unable to locate 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 Servers

You won't have to deal with any kind of silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you obtain one of our semi-dedicated server plans since the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to make sure that all files are intact all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint which is given to each and every file stored on a server. Because we store all content on a number of drives at the same time, the same file has the same checksum on all the drives and what ZFS does is that it compares the checksums between the different drives in real time. When 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 chance of the bad copy to be synchronized on the remaining hard disks. ZFS is the sole file system you can find that uses checksums, which makes it much more reliable than other file systems which are not able to identify silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.