Data corruption is the damage of data due to various hardware or software problems. Once a file is corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as problems are very likely to happen on bigger hard disks where significant volumes of information are located. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and will be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that operate on web servers nowadays often cannot recognize corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

In case you host your sites in a shared web hosting account from our company, you don't have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform employs the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMes. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this type of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This may occur at the time of the writing process on any drive and afterwards a damaged copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all the drives instantly and when a corrupted file is found, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your info will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.