Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various software or hardware problems. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file could be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as problems are much more likely to happen on larger hard disk drives where large volumes of information are placed. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and will be copied on all the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems that operate on web servers these days often are unable to identify corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a cloud hosting account with our company, you will not need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different SSDs. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this type of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This may happen during the writing process on each drive and after that a damaged copy can be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all the drives instantly and in case a corrupted file is located, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your info will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.