Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work properly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. If this kind of a problem occurs and it isn't identified by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be duplicated on all the other drives and the harm will be permanent. Numerous commonly used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on internet hosting servers where large volumes of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

In case you host your websites in a hosting account with our firm, you don't need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform works with the outstanding ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different SSDs. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This could occur during the writing process on any drive and after that a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives right away and in the event that a corrupted file is located, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your data will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.