Data corruption is the damage of data due to various software or hardware problems. Once a file is damaged, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file can be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of info getting harmed without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as fails are very likely to happen on bigger hard drives where considerable volumes of information are located. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the information on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as a regular one and it'll be copied on all the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that operate on web servers nowadays often cannot identify corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. Most of the internet hosting service providers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same data is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive gets damaged for reasons unknown, however, it is more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives since alternative file systems don't offer special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from another hard disk. Because this happens right away, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.