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 that Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find various fail-safes, yet often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect anything. As a result, a bad file will be handled as a regular one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. When some file gets damaged, it will be partially or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to discover a problem early enough or require an extensive time period to be able to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

We have tackled the issue of silent data corruption on all of our shared web hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one on the market that checks all of the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and constantly synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be copied on the other SSDs. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud website hosting platform is that we employ multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.