Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and for that reason, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer show an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, and so on. In the event that such a problem occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become permanent. A number of popular file systems either don't offer real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on hosting servers where huge volumes of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Servers
You will not experience any kind of silent data corruption issues if you acquire one of our semi-dedicated server solutions as the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud hosting platform uses checksums to guarantee that all of the files are undamaged all the time. A checksum is a unique digital fingerprint that is given to each and every file stored on a server. Because 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. 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 without delay, avoiding any possibility of the damaged copy to be synchronized on the other hard disks. ZFS is the only file system you can find that uses checksums, which makes it far superior to other file systems that cannot detect silent data corruption and duplicate bad files across hard drives.