Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field since info recorded on hard drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process requires plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example 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 Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting 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 platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.