The process of files getting corrupted because of some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face as the larger a hard drive is and the more info is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find different fail-safes, but often the info is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Consequently, a corrupted 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. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be even worse. When some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will no longer 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, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most commonly used server file systems feature various checks, they often fail to find a problem early enough or require an extensive amount of time to be able to check all of the files and the web server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Hosting

We guarantee the integrity of the data uploaded in any hosting account which is made on our cloud platform due to the fact that we work with the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only one which was designed to avoid silent data corruption via a unique checksum for each file. We'll store your information on a large number of SSD drives which function in a RAID, so identical files will be available on several places at once. ZFS checks the digital fingerprint of all files on all of the drives in real time and in case the checksum of any file differs from what it needs to be, the file system swaps that file with a healthy copy from a different drive inside the RAID. There's no other file system which uses checksums, so it is possible for data to be silently corrupted and the bad file to be reproduced on all drives over time, but since this can never happen on a server using ZFS, you don't have to concern yourself with the integrity of your data.