The process of files being corrupted because of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more data is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, but often the info is corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins see anything. Because of this, a bad file will be handled as a good one and if the hard disk drive is a part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other disk drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. The moment some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to identify some problem early enough or require a long period of time to be able to check all files and the web server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a website hosting account from our company, you won't have to worry about any of your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that because our cloud hosting platform employs the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. All the info that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a number of NVMes. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file won't be corrupted. This could occur throughout the writing process on each drive and then a corrupted copy may 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 if a corrupted file is found, it's replaced with a good copy with the correct checksum from some other drive. By doing this, your info will remain undamaged no matter what, even if an entire drive fails.