Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various software or hardware fails. After a file gets corrupted, it will no longer work properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file will be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and 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 website hosting servers as problems are very likely to happen on larger in size hard disks where substantial volumes of info are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that operate on web servers nowadays often cannot detect corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

If you host your websites in a cloud website hosting account with our firm, you won't have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform uses the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All information that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of SSD drives. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This could occur at the time of the writing process on any drive and after that a bad copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives live and in the event that a corrupted file is located, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your data will remain intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.