The process of files being damaged caused by some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more info is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There're several fail-safes, still often the information is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators see anything. Thus, a damaged file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be worse. The moment a file gets damaged, it will be partially or fully unreadable, therefore a text file will not be readable, an image file will show a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your website content. Although the most frequently used server file systems feature various checks, they are likely to fail to discover a problem early enough or require a long time period to check all files and the server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Website Hosting

We warrant the integrity of the info uploaded in each and every shared website hosting account that is generated on our cloud platform because we work with the advanced ZFS file system. The latter is the only one that was designed to avoid silent data corruption using a unique checksum for each and every file. We will store your data on a number of SSD drives which work in a RAID, so identical files will be accessible on several places simultaneously. ZFS checks the digital fingerprint of all of the files on all the drives in real time and in case the checksum of any file is different from what it has to be, the file system swaps that file with a healthy version from some other drive in the RAID. No other file system uses checksums, so it is easy for data to be silently corrupted and the bad file to be reproduced on all drives with time, but since this can never happen on a server using ZFS, you don't have to worry about the integrity of your information.