The process of files getting damaged resulting from some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There are different fail-safes, yet often the data is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see a thing. Consequently, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. Once a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so 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 shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most widespread server file systems include various checks, they frequently fail to discover some problem early enough or require a vast period 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 Website Hosting

In case you host your websites in a website hosting account from our firm, you will not have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that since our cloud hosting platform employs the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each file. Any information that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of NVMes. All of the file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file will not be corrupted. This may happen at the time of the writing process on each drive and afterwards a damaged copy can be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all the drives in real time and in case a corrupted file is identified, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your data will continue to be undamaged no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.