The process of files getting damaged owing to some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find several fail-safes, but often the data is corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect anything. Consequently, a bad file will be treated as a good one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. The moment some file gets corrupted, it will be partially or fully unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to detect some problem early enough or require a long amount of time in order to check all of the files and the web hosting server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

If you host your websites in a hosting account with our firm, you don't need to worry about your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform works with the revolutionary ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any kind of data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of NVMe drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives using this type of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This may happen during the writing process on each drive and after that a corrupted 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 instantly and in the event that a corrupted file is located, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. By doing this, your information will continue to be unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.