The process of files being damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems which hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find different fail-safes, still often the info is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice anything. Thus, a corrupted file will be handled as a good one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. Once some file gets corrupted, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most commonly used server file systems include various checks, they often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a vast period of time to be able to check all files and the hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a shared web hosting account from our company, you do not need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform works with the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any kind of data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMes. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This can occur during the writing process on each drive and afterwards a bad copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and if a corrupted file is discovered, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your data will remain undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.