Data corruption is the damage of info due to various software or hardware problems. Once a file is corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are much more likely to occur on larger in size hard drives where large volumes of info are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and will be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which operate on web servers these days often cannot find corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

If you host your sites in a cloud hosting account from our company, you won't have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform uses the amazing ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this type of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This may happen throughout the writing process on each drive and afterwards a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and in case a corrupted file is identified, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your information will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.