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 which web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more information is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're several fail-safes, yet often the info is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see a thing. Consequently, a damaged file will be treated as a good one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer 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 website content. Although the most widely used server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all the files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
In case you host your sites in a web hosting account with our firm, you won't have to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform works with the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMes. All file systems synchronize the files between the separate drives with this kind of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This may happen throughout the writing process on any drive and then a bad copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and in case a corrupted file is found, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your info will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.