The process of files getting damaged as a result of some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face as the larger a hard drive is and the more data is filed on it, the more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are various fail-safes, still often the information is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect anything. As a result, a bad file will be handled as a regular one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other disk drives. In principle, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. When a given file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random blend 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 commonly used server file systems include various checks, they often fail to find some problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all files and the hosting server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we employ on our cloud platform. The vast majority of hosting suppliers, including our company, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, the same info is synchronized between the drives all the time. When a file on a drive becomes corrupted for whatever reason, yet, it is likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives as alternative file systems do not offer special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, so the damaged copy will be swapped with a good one from another disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens immediately, there's no possibility for any of your files to ever get damaged.