The process of files getting damaged as a result of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is among the main problems that web hosting companies face because the larger a hard disk drive is and the more information is filed on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You can find various fail-safes, still often the info gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators notice a thing. Consequently, a corrupted 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. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get even worse. Once some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely unreadable, so a text file will not 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 losing your content. Although the most well-known server file systems include various checks, they often fail to find some problem early enough or require an extensive time period to check all the files and the hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We've resolved the problem of silent data corruption on all of our shared web hosting servers by using the advanced Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems since it is the only one in existence that checks all the files right away by employing a checksum - a digital identifier which is unique for each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and continually synchronized between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly examines the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as damaged, it is replaced right away with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the other NVMes. ZFS needs lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the benefit of our cloud hosting platform is that we work with multiple very powerful servers working together. In case you host your websites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.