The process of files getting damaged because of some hardware or software failure is called data corruption and this is one of the main problems that Internet hosting companies face since the larger a hard drive is and the more data is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There are different fail-safes, but often the info is corrupted silently, so neither the file system, nor the admins notice anything. Thus, a damaged file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard disk is a part of a RAID, the file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. When some file gets corrupted, it will be partly or fully unreadable, which means that a text file will not be readable, an image file will present a random combination of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your content. Although the most widely used server file systems have various checks, they often fail to identify a problem early enough or require an extensive time period in order to check all files and the hosting server will not be operational for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Web Hosting
We've dealt with the issue of silent data corruption on our shared web hosting servers by using the leading-edge Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is more advanced than other file systems because it is the only one in existence which checks all files instantly by using a checksum - a digital identifier that is unique for every single file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be stored on several NVMe drives and frequently synced between them for redundancy. ZFS constantly compares the checksum of all files and when any file is detected as corrupted, it's replaced quickly with a good copy from another disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a bad file may remain or may be copied on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires lots of physical memory in order to carry out the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple very powerful servers working together. If you host your Internet sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.