Data corruption is the damage of data caused by various hardware or software problems. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an app will not start or will give errors, a text file shall be partially or entirely unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of information getting harmed without any identification by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for website hosting servers as failures are very likely to occur on bigger hard disk drives where significant volumes of information are placed. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's likely that the damaged file will be treated as a standard one and it'll be duplicated on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which run on web servers today often are not able to identify corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud web hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. Most of the web hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. In case a file on a drive gets corrupted for some reason, yet, it is very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as alternative file systems do not feature special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different hard drive. As this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.