Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software failure, and due to this fact, a file could become partially or entirely corrupted, so it will no longer work properly since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for example, will no longer display an authentic image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that this kind of an issue occurs and it isn't recognized by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and in case this happens on a drive that is a part of a RAID array where the data is synchronized between various different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all the other drives and the damage will become permanent. Many popular file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have high quality ones that will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common problem on internet hosting servers where huge volumes of information are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting
If you host your websites in a shared website hosting account from our company, you do not need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform works with the reliable ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of SSD drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this type of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This can occur at the time of the writing process on any drive and then a corrupted copy can be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives immediately and when a corrupted file is identified, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your info will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.