The process of files being corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more info is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You can find various fail-safes, still often the data is corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Because of this, a bad file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your website content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to find a problem early enough or require a long amount of time to be able to check all the files and the hosting server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

In case you host your websites in a cloud website hosting account from our firm, you don't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform works with the outstanding ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This may occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and afterwards a corrupted copy may be copied on the other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all drives live and in the event that a corrupted file is discovered, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your data will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.