Data corruption is the unintended modification of a file or the losing of information which usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and because of this, a file may become partially or fully corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly because its bits will be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer present an accurate 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 such an issue occurs and it isn't noticed by the system or by an administrator, the data will get 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 will be reproduced on all the other drives and the damage will be permanent. Many popular file systems either don't have real-time checks or don't have good ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on web hosting servers where huge volumes of info are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we make use of on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, identical data is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive is damaged for whatever reason, however, it's likely that it will be copied on the other drives because alternative file systems do not feature special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the bad copy shall be replaced with a good one from a different hard disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens immediately, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.