Data corruption is the damage of data because of various hardware or software failures. The moment a file gets damaged, it will no longer work 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 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 website hosting servers as failures are very likely to happen on bigger hard disks where substantial volumes of information are kept. When a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and it will be copied on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often cannot detect corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not functioning.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a shared website hosting account from our firm, you will not have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform uses the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any kind of data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This may occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and afterwards a bad copy can be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives live and when a corrupted file is identified, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your data will remain unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.