Data corruption is the accidental transformation of a file or the losing of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and because of this, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly as its bits shall be scrambled or lost. 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 since its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such an issue occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive which is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will be permanent. A number of frequently used file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on web hosting servers where large volumes of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our website hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as it is the only one out there that checks all files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and regularly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced quickly 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 NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.