The process of files being damaged due to some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You'll find different fail-safes, but often the data is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see anything. As a result, a damaged file will be handled as a good one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. Once a file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will display a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your website content. Although the most commonly used server file systems include various checks, they frequently fail to find some problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time to be able to check all files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is better than other file systems as it is the only one out there which checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier that's unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly examines the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other SSDs. ZFS needs a lot of physical memory in order to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.