Data corruption is the damage of data because of various hardware or software fails. The moment a file is damaged, it will no longer function correctly, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file can be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open then unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting harmed without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a significant problem for website hosting servers as fails are very likely to occur on bigger hard disk drives where vast volumes of information are placed. In case a drive is part of a RAID and the data on it is replicated on other drives for redundancy, it's very likely that the bad file will be treated as a healthy one and will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. A lot of the file systems which operate on web servers nowadays often cannot detect 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 Shared Web Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared web hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting suppliers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, the exact same info is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive is damaged for reasons unknown, however, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives because alternative file systems do not offer special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy shall be replaced with a good one from a different drive. Since this happens instantly, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.