The process of files being corrupted as a result of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There're a couple of fail-safes, still often the info gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When some file gets damaged, it will be partially or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most well-known server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast amount of time in order to check all files and the hosting server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

If you host your websites in a cloud hosting account from our company, you don't have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform uses the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of SSD drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this type of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This could occur during the writing process on each drive and after that a bad copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all drives live and in the event that a corrupted file is identified, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your information will continue to be intact no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.