The process of files getting corrupted as a result 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 drive is and the more information is stored on it, the much more likely it is for data to be corrupted. There're various fail-safes, but often the info is corrupted silently, so neither the particular file system, nor the admins detect a thing. Consequently, a bad file will be treated as a regular one and if the HDD is a part of a RAID, that file will be duplicated on all other drives. In theory, this is for redundancy, but in practice the damage will be worse. Once a given file gets corrupted, it will be partly or completely unreadable, so a text file will no longer be readable, an image file will present a random mix of colors in case it opens at all and an archive will be impossible to unpack, and you risk losing your site content. Although the most popular server file systems include various checks, they frequently fail to detect a problem early enough or require a long time period to be able to check all files and the web server will not be functional in the meantime.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Shared Hosting
We have tackled the problem of silent data corruption on our shared hosting servers by using the state-of-the-art Z file system, or ZFS. The latter is superior to other file systems because it is the only one on the market that checks all the 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 continually synced between them for redundancy. ZFS regularly analyzes the checksum of all files and in the event that any file is detected as damaged, it's replaced right away with a good copy from some other disk. As this happens in real time, there's no risk that a corrupted file may remain or may be duplicated on the rest of the NVMes. ZFS requires a lot of physical memory in order to execute the real-time checks and the advantage of our cloud hosting platform is that we use multiple powerful servers working together. If you host your sites with us, your information will be undamaged no matter what.