The process of files getting corrupted as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk is and the more data is placed on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. You'll find several fail-safes, but often the info gets corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Consequently, a bad file will be handled as a regular one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, the file will be copied on all other drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or completely 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, and you risk sacrificing your site content. Although the most commonly used server file systems include various checks, they quite often fail to discover a problem early enough or require a vast time period in order to check all of the files and the server will not be functional for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system that we take advantage of on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting service providers, including our company, use multiple hard disks to keep content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive becomes damaged for reasons unknown, yet, it is more than likely that it will be copied on the other drives as other file systems don't have special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS uses a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, which means that the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different drive. Since this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.