The process of files being corrupted because of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more info is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There're different fail-safes, yet often the data is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or completely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they frequently fail to discover a problem early enough or require a long amount of time to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

In case you host your websites in a shared hosting account with our firm, you won't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform works with the reliable ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on numerous NVMe drives. All the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there is no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This could occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and after that a corrupted copy can be copied on the other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and if a corrupted file is found, it's swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. In this way, your info will stay undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.