Data corruption is the unintentional transformation of a file or the loss of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and due to this fact, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. If this kind of a problem appears and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become permanent. Many widely used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or don't have good ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where huge volumes of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on our web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all of the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.