Data corruption is the damage of info caused by various hardware or software fails. Once a file is corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, 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 and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for web hosting servers as fails are more likely to occur on larger in size hard drives where vast volumes of info are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and it will be duplicated on all drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers nowadays often are unable to recognize corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
In case you host your websites in a cloud hosting account with our company, you don't have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform uses the amazing ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All information that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different SSD drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this type of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This can occur during the writing process on any drive and then a damaged copy may be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives right away and when a corrupted file is found, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. In this way, your information will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.