The process of files being damaged owing to 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 drive is and the more information is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You will find various fail-safes, yet often the information gets corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the administrators see a thing. As a result, a damaged file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk drive is 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 be even worse. The moment some file gets damaged, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will show a random blend of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your site content. Although the most widespread server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to find a problem early enough or require an extensive period of time to check all the files and the web hosting server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Website Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system that we make use of on our cloud platform. The majority of hosting providers, like our firm, use multiple hard disks to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive is damaged for reasons unknown, however, it's very likely that it will be copied on the other drives because other file systems don't include special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from a different hard drive. Due to the fact that this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.