Data corruption is the damage of data because of various software or hardware fails. The moment a file is corrupted, it will no longer function properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or completely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as fails are very likely to occur on larger hard disks where significant volumes of info are placed. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers these days often are unable to locate corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers

We've avoided any risk of files getting corrupted silently as the servers where your semi-dedicated server account will be created employ a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint that's checked in real time. Since we keep all content on multiple NVMe drives, ZFS checks if the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In the event that there's a mismatch, the corrupted copy is replaced with a healthy one from one of the other drives and since this happens in real time, there is no chance that a damaged copy can remain on our servers or that it can be copied to the other drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems use this type of checks and in addition, even during a file system check following a sudden blackout, none of them will detect silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the constant checksum monitoring makes a lenghty file system check unneeded.