Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the loss of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer function as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or missing. 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 for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. When this kind of a problem occurs and it's not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be replicated on all the other drives and the damage will be long term. Many frequently used file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have good ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common issue on web hosting servers where large volumes of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

We warrant the integrity of the information uploaded in every single shared web hosting account which is created on our cloud platform because we use the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only one that was designed to avoid silent data corruption via a unique checksum for each and every file. We'll store your data on a number of SSD drives which function in a RAID, so the very same files will exist on several places concurrently. ZFS checks the digital fingerprint of all files on all of the drives in real time and in the event that the checksum of any file differs from what it should be, the file system swaps that file with an undamaged copy from a different drive within the RAID. There's no other file system which uses checksums, so it's easy for data to get silently corrupted and the bad file to be duplicated on all drives with time, but since this can never happen on a server running ZFS, you do not have to concern yourself with the integrity of your data.