The process of files being corrupted due to some hardware or software failure is known as data corruption and this is one of the main problems that web hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more data is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're various fail-safes, yet often the information gets damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect anything. As a result, a corrupted file will be handled as a standard one and if the hard disk is part of a RAID, that file will be copied on all other drives. In theory, this is done for redundancy, but in reality the damage will be even worse. Once some file gets damaged, it will be partially or completely unreadable, therefore a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random blend of colors if it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, so you risk losing your site content. Although the most widespread server file systems include various checks, they are likely to fail to detect a problem early enough or require a vast amount of time to check all files and the web hosting server will not be functional for the time being.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting
The integrity of the data that you upload to your new cloud hosting account shall be guaranteed by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most web hosting service providers, like our firm, use multiple hard disk drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, identical data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. When a file on a drive gets corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it is very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as alternative 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 bad copy will be swapped with a good one from another hard disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk for any of your files to ever get corrupted.