The process of files getting corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more data is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There're various fail-safes, yet often the information becomes damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. Thus, a bad file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. The moment a file gets damaged, it will be partly or entirely unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your site content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they frequently fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast period of time to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting providers, including our company, use multiple hard drives to store content and because the drives work in a RAID, the exact same information is synchronized between the drives at all times. In case a file on a drive becomes damaged for some reason, however, it is more than likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because other file systems don't feature special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS works with a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In the event that a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from another hard disk. Since this happens immediately, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be damaged.