The process of files getting corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more information is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find various fail-safes, but often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice anything. As a result, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast period of time to be able to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
You won't experience any silent data corruption issues whatsoever in case you get one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages since the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to ensure that all the files are intact all of the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is assigned to each and every file saved on a server. As we store all content on multiple drives simultaneously, the same file uses the same checksum on all 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 has to be, it replaces that file with a healthy copy right away, avoiding any probability of the bad copy to be synchronized on the rest of the drives. ZFS is the only file system out there which uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that are unable to identify silent data corruption and copy bad files across hard drives.