Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various software or hardware fails. After a file gets damaged, it will no longer function properly, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or completely unreadable, an archive 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, which makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as problems are very likely to occur on larger in size hard disk drives where large volumes of info are stored. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and will be copied on all drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems which operate on web servers today often cannot locate corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most web hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same info is synchronized between the drives at all times. If a file on a drive is damaged for whatever reason, yet, it is more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives because other file systems don't offer special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from another hard disk drive. Because this happens in real time, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.