Data corruption is the damage of info due to various software or hardware problems. The moment a file is damaged, it will no longer function accurately, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or completely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are more likely to happen on larger hard disk drives where substantial volumes of info are placed. If a drive is part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as a regular one and will be copied on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that operate on web servers today often are not able to identify corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
If you host your websites in a shared website hosting account from our firm, you will not have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform employs the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All of the info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple SSDs. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this type of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This may happen during the writing process on any drive and then a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives instantly and when a corrupted file is found, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your info will stay unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.