Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field because information recorded on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We're able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's an additional benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.