Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and as a consequence, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. When such an issue occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all other drives and the harm will become permanent. A large number of widespread file systems either do not offer 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 very common problem on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

In case you host your sites in a shared hosting account with our company, you will not have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any kind of info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different SSD drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives live and in the event that a corrupted file is identified, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your info will stay undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.