Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field as info stored on hard disks is generally compressed in order to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This method uses plenty of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We are able to benefit from this feature although it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's another advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.