Data corruption is the damage of information because of various software or hardware problems. After a file gets damaged, it will no longer function accurately, so an application will not start or will give errors, a text file could be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as fails are very likely to happen on bigger hard drives where significant volumes of information are stored. When a drive is part of a RAID and the info on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it's more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an ordinary one and will be duplicated on all the drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems that operate on web servers these days often are not able to detect corrupted files right away or they need time-consuming system checks through which the server isn't functioning.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We have dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on all our shared web hosting servers by using the amazing Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one on the market which checks all files instantly by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud web hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.