Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function properly because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. In the event that this kind of an issue appears and it isn't found by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that's part of a RAID array where the information is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all of the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Numerous widely used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on hosting servers where large amounts of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

If you host your websites in a website hosting account from our firm, you will not have to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure 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 information that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMes. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file won't be corrupted. This may happen during the writing process on each drive and afterwards a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and in the event that a corrupted file is identified, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your data will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.