The process of files being corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems which Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more information is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find various fail-safes, still often the information becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see anything. Thus, a bad file will be handled as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. The moment a file gets corrupted, 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, and you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to find some problem early enough or require a long amount of time to check all files and the hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a cloud website hosting account from our company, you will not have to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform uses the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple NVMes. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This may occur at the time of the writing process on any drive and then a corrupted copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS examines the checksums of all files on all of the drives instantly and when a corrupted file is located, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your info will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.