Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a true image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etc. If such a problem appears and it isn't identified by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all other drives and the harm will become long term. Many widely used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on web hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a cloud hosting account from our company, you do not need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMe drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This can occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and after that a corrupted copy may 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 drives immediately and in the event that a corrupted file is discovered, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your info will continue to be intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.