Data corruption is the damage of information because of various hardware or software fails. When a file is damaged, it will no longer function properly, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file will be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as failures are more likely to happen on bigger hard drives where substantial volumes of information are kept. In case a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers today often are unable to find corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't working.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

In case you host your websites in a shared hosting account with our company, you do not have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform uses the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any information that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple SSD drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not get corrupted. This could occur during the writing process on each drive and afterwards a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives right away and if a corrupted file is identified, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your data will remain intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.