Data corruption is the unintentional modification of a file or the loss of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function correctly since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If such a problem appears and it is not noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become permanent. A large number of popular file systems either don't have real-time checks or don't have high quality ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where large volumes of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be resistant to silent data corruption because all our storage servers make use of the innovative ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, in order to verify the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on a couple of redundant drives operating in a RAID i.e. the files will be the same across all disks. All copies of a given file will have the same checksum on all hard drives and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates right away, and if it identifies a mismatch, which would indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll replace that file with a healthy copy from one of the other disks. Even if there is an unexpected blackout, the data on the servers won't be corrupted and there won't be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some malfunction, lengthening the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.