The process of files getting corrupted as a result of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems which web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more info is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You'll find different fail-safes, still often the data is damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. As a result, a corrupted file will be treated as a good one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. The moment some 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, so you risk losing your website content. Although the most well-known server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to find a problem early enough or require a vast period of time to be able to check all of the files and the hosting server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we make use of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting providers, like our company, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same information is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it is likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives since other file systems don't offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy will be replaced with a good one from a different hard disk drive. Since this happens instantly, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever be damaged.