Data corruption is the damage of data because of various hardware or software failures. Once a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function properly, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as problems are much more likely to occur on larger hard drives where considerable volumes of info are stored. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as a standard one and will be copied on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems that run on web servers today often are unable to recognize corrupted files instantly or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server is not operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of internet hosting providers, including our company, use multiple HDDs to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive is damaged for some reason, however, it's likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives since other file systems don't feature special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy shall be swapped with a good one from a different drive. As this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.