Data corruption is the accidental modification of a file or the loss of info that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software fail, and as a result, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer function as it should because its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a real image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack for the reason that its content will be unreadable, and so on. In case such an issue occurs and it is not recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file will be reproduced on all of the other drives and the damage will be long term. Numerous widely used file systems either do not offer real-time checks or do not have good ones that will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common matter on hosting servers where large amounts of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

We have dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all our cloud website hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all of the files in real time by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately 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 rest of the NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we employ multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.