Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly as its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer show an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such an issue occurs and it's not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all of the other drives and the harm will be permanent. Many popular file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have good ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common matter on web hosting servers where huge amounts of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a hosting account with our company, you do not have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform works with the amazing ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMe drives. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with such a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This could happen throughout the writing process on any drive and then a bad copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all of the drives immediately and if a corrupted file is found, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your info will stay undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.