Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the losing of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and consequently, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function properly since its bits will be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer show a real image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that such a problem occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file shall be copied on all the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Many widely used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on hosting servers where large amounts of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

We warrant the integrity of the information uploaded in each website hosting account which is generated on our cloud platform due to the fact that we use the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only one that was designed to avoid silent data corruption using a unique checksum for each file. We'll store your info on a large number of SSD drives that function in a RAID, so identical files will exist on several places simultaneously. ZFS checks the digital fingerprint of all files on all drives in real time and if the checksum of any file differs from what it needs to be, the file system replaces that file with a healthy copy from a different drive in the RAID. There's no other file system that uses checksums, so it is easy for data to become silently corrupted and the bad file to be replicated on all drives with time, but since that can never happen on a server running ZFS, you will not have to concern yourself with the integrity of your info.