The process of files getting damaged caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems which web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more data is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are various fail-safes, yet often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see a thing. Thus, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. Once a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your website content. Although the most widely used server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a long time period to check all of the files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a cloud website hosting account from our firm, you won't 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 which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any kind of data that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMes. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This can happen throughout the writing process on each drive and afterwards a bad copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What makes the difference on our platform is the fact that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives in real time and when a corrupted file is discovered, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. This way, your data will stay unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.