Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and for that reason, a file can become partially or fully corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly because its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such an issue occurs and it is not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all of the other drives and the harm will be permanent. Many frequently used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or do not have good ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on internet hosting servers where large volumes of data are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

If you host your sites in a shared web hosting account from our company, you do not have to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform works with the reliable ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any information that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple SSDs. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this type of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and when a corrupted file is discovered, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your info will remain unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.