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 hosting companies face since the larger a hard disk is and the more info is stored on it, the more likely it is for data to be corrupted. You can find different fail-safes, yet often the information becomes damaged silently, so neither the file system, nor the administrators detect anything. Because of this, a corrupted file will be treated as a standard one and if the hard drive is part of a RAID, that particular file will be duplicated on all other drives. In principle, this is for redundancy, but in reality the damage will get worse. Once some file gets damaged, it will be partly or fully unreadable, therefore 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 widespread server file systems feature various checks, they quite often fail to detect some problem early enough or require a vast time period to check all the files and the hosting server will not be operational for the time being.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting

The integrity of the data that you upload to your new shared hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we use on our cloud platform. The vast majority of web hosting providers, like our company, use multiple hard drives to keep content and since the drives work in a RAID, the exact same data is synchronized between the drives all of the time. If a file on a drive becomes damaged for reasons unknown, however, it is very likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives as other file systems don't offer special checks for this. In contrast to them, ZFS employs a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In the event that a file gets corrupted, its checksum won't match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the damaged copy will be replaced with a good one from another hard drive. Since this happens in real time, there is no possibility for any of your files to ever get damaged.