Data corruption is the damage of data due to various software or hardware problems. When a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on bigger hard drives where significant volumes of information are kept. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and it will be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A huge number of the file systems which operate on web servers today often are unable to recognize corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting service providers, including our firm, use multiple HDDs to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. When a file on a drive gets corrupted for whatever reason, yet, it's likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as alternative file systems do not offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from a different disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens right away, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever be damaged.