The process of files being damaged resulting from some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more info is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. You'll find various fail-safes, still often the information is damaged silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect anything. As a result, a damaged file will be treated as a regular one and if the hard disk drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other disk drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. The moment a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely 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 shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most widespread server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast period of time in order to check all files and the hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We've dealt with the matter of silent data corruption on our shared website hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems as 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 and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and constantly synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly analyzes the checksum of all files and in case any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced promptly with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a damaged file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs plenty of physical memory to perform the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud web hosting platform is that we work with multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your data will be undamaged no matter what.