Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the loss of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such a problem appears and it's not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive which is part of a RAID array where the info is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all of the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Many commonly used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on internet hosting servers where large volumes of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

In case you host your websites in a shared website hosting account with our firm, you will not need to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform uses the reliable ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses 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 SSD drives. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this type of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy can be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives in real time and if a corrupted file is located, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your information will stay unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.