The process of files getting damaged as a result of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face as the larger a hard drive is and the more information is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You will find various fail-safes, but often the data becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. Consequently, a damaged file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most well-known server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to identify a problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time to check all of the files and the web hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a cloud web hosting account with our firm, you do not have to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that since our cloud hosting platform employs the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any information that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many SSD drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't get corrupted. This can occur throughout the writing process on any drive and after that a bad 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 immediately and in case a corrupted file is identified, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your data will stay intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.