The process of files being damaged as a consequence of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems which hosting companies face because the larger a hard drive is and the more info is kept on it, the much more likely it is for data to become corrupted. There are various fail-safes, but often the info is damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins detect anything. Because of this, a corrupted file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. Theoretically, this is done for redundancy, but in practice the damage will get worse. When a given file gets corrupted, it will be partially or entirely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk sacrificing your content. Although the most well-known server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to find a problem early enough or require an extensive period of time to be able to check all files and the hosting server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Website Hosting
If you host your Internet sites in a website hosting account from our company, you won't need to worry about your data ever getting damaged. We can ensure that due to the fact that our cloud hosting platform employs the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned is the only file system which uses checksums, or unique digital fingerprints, for every single file. Any kind of info that you upload will be saved in a RAID i.e. simultaneously on multiple SSD drives. Many file systems synchronize the files between the different drives with such a setup, but there's no real guarantee that a file will not be corrupted. This may occur at the time of the writing process on any drive and afterwards a bad copy may be copied on all other drives. What is different on our platform is that ZFS compares the checksums of all files on all of the drives immediately and in the event that a corrupted file is discovered, it is swapped with a good copy with the correct checksum from another drive. This way, your data will stay intact no matter what, even if a whole drive fails.