The process of files being corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find various fail-safes, still often the info becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see anything. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. The moment some file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to discover some problem early enough or require an extensive period of time to check all the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

If you host your websites in a cloud hosting account from our firm, you do not need to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform works with the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter is the only file system that uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. All the info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of SSDs. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this type of a setup, but there is no real warranty that a file will not get corrupted. This can occur at the time of the writing process on each drive and then a bad copy may be copied on all other drives. What makes the difference on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all the drives immediately and when a corrupted file is located, it is replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. That way, your info will remain unharmed no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.