Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of info that often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software fail, and for that reason, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should as its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for example, will no longer show a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack since its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In case such an issue occurs and it's not noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will become corrupted silently and when this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all of the other drives and the harm will become permanent. Many commonly used file systems either do not feature real-time checks or do not have good ones which can detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a very common problem on web hosting servers where huge amounts of data are stored.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all of our shared web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one on the market which checks all of the files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.