The process of files being damaged because of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are different fail-safes, still often the information becomes corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins see a thing. Thus, a corrupted file will be treated as a good one and if the hard drive is a part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other disk drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. The moment a file gets corrupted, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most commonly used server file systems have various checks, they often fail to detect some problem early enough or require a long amount of time to be able to check all files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

We've dealt with the problem of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there that checks all files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and if any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced immediately with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs a lot 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. If you host your Internet sites with us, your data will be intact no matter what.