Data corruption is the damage of info because of various hardware or software problems. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, which makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as failures are much more likely to occur on bigger hard drives where considerable volumes of information are stored. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is likely that the bad file will be treated as an undamaged one and it will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers nowadays often are unable to identify corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new web hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we employ on our cloud platform. The majority of internet hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard disks to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives all the time. When a file on a drive becomes corrupted for some reason, yet, it's very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as other file systems don't include special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy will be replaced with a good one from another drive. Because this happens instantly, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever be damaged.