The process of files getting damaged due to some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more data is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find a couple of fail-safes, but often the information gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Consequently, a bad file will be handled 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 done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. When a given 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 mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your content. Although the most well-known server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to find some problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all of the files and the server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud website hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system which we work with on our cloud platform. The vast majority of internet hosting providers, including our company, use multiple hard disk drives to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, exactly the same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. When a file on a drive becomes corrupted for whatever reason, however, it is more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives because alternative file systems don't include special checks for that. Unlike them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. If a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from a different hard disk. Because this happens immediately, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be corrupted.