The process of files being corrupted caused by some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems which hosting companies face as the larger a hard disk is and the more data is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You can find a couple of fail-safes, but often the info is damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Consequently, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. Once a file gets damaged, it will be partly or completely unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to find a problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to be able to check all the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Web Hosting

We've tackled the problem of silent data corruption on all our cloud web hosting servers by using the hi-tech Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one out there which checks all the files right away by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for each file. When you upload content to your account, it will be stored on several SSD drives and frequently synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there is no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the SSDs. ZFS requires plenty of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your information will be intact no matter what.