The process of files getting damaged caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more data is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find a couple of fail-safes, but often the information gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect a thing. As a result, a corrupted file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not 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, and you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most frequently used server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to identify a problem early enough or require a long amount of time to check all the files and the web server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared website hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we employ on our cloud platform. Most web hosting providers, including our firm, use multiple hard disks to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives all the time. In case a file on a drive becomes damaged for whatever reason, yet, it's likely that it will be copied on the other drives as alternative file systems do not include special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from a different drive. As this happens immediately, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.