The process of files getting damaged caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is among the main problems that hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more information is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, still often the info 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 disk is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other disk drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random combination 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 widely used server file systems have various checks, they often fail to find a problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time to check all the files and the hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

We've tackled the matter of silent data corruption on all our cloud web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems as it is the only one in existence that checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several SSD drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the remaining SSDs. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your info will be intact no matter what.