The process of files getting corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is referred to as data corruption and this is one of the main problems which web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk drive is and the more info is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are various fail-safes, but often the information gets corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice anything. Because of this, a bad file will be handled as a good one and if the HDD is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. The moment a given file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, so a text file will not be readable, an image file will display a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive shall be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your website content. Although the most popular server file systems have various checks, they are likely to fail to find some problem early enough or require a vast period of time to check all of the files and the web server will not be operational in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
If you host your websites in a cloud hosting account with our firm, you won't have to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can guarantee that because our cloud hosting platform uses the amazing ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system that works with checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for each and every file. Any information that you upload will be kept in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on a large number of SSDs. All file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with this kind of a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This may occur during the writing process on each drive and after that a corrupted copy may be copied on the rest of the drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS analyzes the checksums of all files on all of the drives instantly and if a corrupted file is identified, it is substituted with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. In this way, your data will remain intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.