Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and for that reason, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly since its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, and so on. If such an issue occurs and it is not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive that is part of a RAID array where the information is synchronized between various drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will become long term. Numerous frequently used file systems either don't have real-time checks or do not have high quality ones which will detect a problem before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on web hosting servers where large volumes of data are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We've resolved the issue of silent data corruption on all our shared hosting servers by using the modern Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all files immediately by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining NVMes. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.