Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field because info recorded on hard disk drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, 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 web 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 affect 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 that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We are able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really 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 recover any content that you delete by accident.