The process of files getting corrupted resulting from some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more data is kept on it, the more likely it is for data to get corrupted. There are various fail-safes, still often the information gets corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Because of this, a corrupted file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get even worse. When some file gets corrupted, it will be partially or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random combination of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your website content. Although the most widespread server file systems have various checks, they quite often fail to find some problem early enough or require a long time period to be able to check all files and the hosting server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we use on our cloud platform. Most web hosting suppliers, including 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 the time. In case a file on a drive gets corrupted for whatever reason, however, it is likely that it will be reproduced on the other drives because alternative file systems do not feature special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every single file. In case a file gets damaged, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy will be replaced with a good one from a different hard disk drive. Since this happens immediately, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever be damaged.