Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the loss of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and due to this fact, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer work properly because its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an accurate image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etc. In case this kind of a problem appears and it is not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all the other drives and the harm will become permanent. Many commonly used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on web hosting servers where substantial amounts of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We've tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our shared hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced instantly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.