Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the loss of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and for that reason, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work properly as its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for example, will no longer show an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that this kind of an issue appears and it is not recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all other drives and the damage will become permanent. A large number of widely used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on web hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems since it is the only one on the market that checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in case 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 copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we take advantage of multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.