Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software problems. After a file is damaged, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as problems are more likely to occur on larger in size hard drives where vast volumes of info are kept. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and it will be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers these days often cannot identify corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a cloud web hosting account with our firm, you will not have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform uses the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All the data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMe drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on each drive and after that a corrupted copy can be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all of the drives live and when a corrupted file is found, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your information will stay undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.