The process of files getting corrupted because of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You can find several fail-safes, yet often the info gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins notice anything. Consequently, a bad file will be treated as a good one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. Once some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most widespread server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to discover some problem early enough or require a long period of time in order to check all of the files and the web hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We've resolved the problem of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the leading-edge 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 of the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as corrupted, it is replaced promptly 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 copied on the remaining NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud website hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.