Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the losing of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and as a consequence, a file may become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work as it should since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an actual 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 a problem occurs and it's not found by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be reproduced on all the other drives and the harm will be long term. Numerous popular file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common issue on internet hosting servers where huge amounts of information are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on all of our cloud hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one in existence that checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case 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's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your info will be undamaged no matter what.