Data corruption is the unintended change of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason can be hardware or software failure, and as a result, a file may become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly since its bits shall be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer show an actual image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etc. In the event that such a problem appears and it is not identified by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive that's a part of a RAID array where the data is synced between different drives, the corrupted file will be replicated on all the other drives and the damage will be permanent. A large number of widespread file systems either don't offer 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 rather common problem on web hosting servers where huge volumes of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
In case you host your sites in a shared hosting account from our company, you will not need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform uses the reliable ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All the info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMe drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This could occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and after that a corrupted copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives instantly and in the event that a corrupted file is located, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your data will stay undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.