Data corruption is the unintentional change of a file or the losing of information that usually occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software malfunction, and due to this fact, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it will no longer work correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or missing. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an accurate image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. In the event that such a problem occurs and it isn't found by the system or by an admin, the data will get corrupted silently and if this happens on a drive that is part of a RAID array where the info is synchronized between different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all the other drives and the harm will be long term. Many commonly used file systems either don't feature real-time checks or don't have good ones which will detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common problem on hosting servers where huge amounts of data are kept.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we make use of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of hosting providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the exact same information is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive gets damaged for whatever reason, yet, it's more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives because alternative file systems do not offer special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different drive. Since this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.