Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of info which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and consequently, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an authentic image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that this kind of an issue appears and it's not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all of the other drives and the harm will be long term. A number of widely used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of information are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new web hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting providers, including our firm, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the exact same information is synchronized between the drives all the time. When a file on a drive becomes damaged for whatever reason, however, it's very likely that it will be copied on the other drives since other file systems don't include special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different hard drive. Due to the fact that this happens immediately, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.