Data corruption is the damage of information caused by various hardware or software failures. After a file is damaged, it will no longer work correctly, so an application will not start or shall give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting damaged without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a significant problem for hosting servers as fails are much more likely to happen on larger in size hard disks where vast volumes of info are stored. If a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is very likely that the bad file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the damage permanent. A huge number of the file systems which run on web servers nowadays often are not able to discover corrupted files immediately or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting
If you host your websites in a hosting account with our firm, you do not have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that as our cloud hosting platform employs the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any kind of data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMes. Many file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using such a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This can happen during the writing process on any drive and then a damaged copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives live and when a corrupted file is located, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your info will remain unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.