Data corruption is the damage of data due to various software or hardware failures. The moment a file is damaged, it will no longer work as it should, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as fails are very likely to occur on larger in size hard drives where vast volumes of information are placed. When a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the bad file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which run on web servers nowadays often cannot recognize corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we make use of on our cloud platform. The majority of internet hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple HDDs to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive becomes corrupted for reasons unknown, yet, it is likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as other file systems do not have special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from a different hard drive. Due to the fact that this happens instantly, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.