Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field since data filed on hard drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than 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. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's one more reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you can always recover any content that you erase by mistake.