The process of files getting corrupted because of 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 disk drive is and the more data is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You'll find different fail-safes, but often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect anything. Consequently, a bad file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most widespread server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to detect a problem early enough or require an extensive period of time in order to check all files and the web hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a website hosting account with our company, you do not have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform uses the outstanding ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All of the data that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on many different NVMe drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't be corrupted. This could occur at the time of the writing process on any drive and after that a damaged 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 the drives immediately and in the event that a corrupted file is identified, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your information will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.