Data corruption is the damage of information due to various hardware or software failures. The moment a file is damaged, it will no longer work properly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or fully unreadable, an archive will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any acknowledgement by the system or an administrator, that makes it a serious problem for web hosting servers as fails are much more likely to occur on bigger hard drives where large volumes of info are placed. When a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is duplicated on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the bad file will be treated as an ordinary one and will be copied on all drives, making the damage permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers today often are not able to discover corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server isn't operational.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. The majority of hosting providers, including our firm, use multiple hard disks to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive gets damaged for some reason, however, it's more than likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives because other file systems don't offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy shall be swapped with a good one from another hard drive. Since this happens immediately, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get corrupted.