Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software failures. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as fails are more likely to happen on larger hard disks where large volumes of info are kept. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers these days often are unable to recognize corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

If you host your sites in a shared hosting account with our company, you will not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform employs the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All information that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMes. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This may occur throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged copy can be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives immediately and when a corrupted file is discovered, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your info will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.