Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data kept on HDDs is usually compressed to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups 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 need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We're able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you can always restore any content that you erase by mistake.