Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly because its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer display a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case such a problem occurs and it is not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all the other drives and the harm will become long term. A large number of widespread file systems either do not have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

If you host your websites in a web hosting account with our firm, you won't have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform employs the amazing ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any kind of info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMes. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this kind of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file won't be corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a corrupted copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives instantly and in case a corrupted file is found, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your info will remain intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.