Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the losing of information that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software failure, and as a consequence, a file can 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 show an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etc. If such a problem occurs and it's not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Many popular file systems either do not offer 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 common issue on internet hosting servers where huge volumes of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

In case you host your sites in a shared website hosting account with our company, you don't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform uses the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of SSDs. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with such a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on each drive and then a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives right away and in case a corrupted file is found, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your information will remain unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.