The process of files getting corrupted owing to some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more information is placed on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You will find various fail-safes, yet often the information is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins notice anything. As a result, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your website content. Although the most popular server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to discover a problem early enough or require a long time period to check all files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a cloud hosting account with our company, you won't have to worry about any of your data ever getting corrupted. We can ensure that as our cloud hosting platform works with the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. All of the data that you upload will be stored in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of SSD drives. A lot of file systems synchronize the files between the different drives using this kind of a setup, but there's no real warranty that a file won't get corrupted. This can happen during the writing process on any drive and then a bad copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is the fact that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all drives in real time and when a corrupted file is identified, it's substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. That way, your information will stay unharmed no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.