Data corruption is the damage of data because of various software or hardware problems. When a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as failures are much more likely to occur on larger in size hard disk drives where large volumes of information are located. If a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a good one and it'll be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often are unable to find corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

In case you host your sites in a shared hosting account with our firm, you don't need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform works with the revolutionary ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This could happen at the time of the writing process on each drive and then a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and in case a corrupted file is found, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your data will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.