Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field since info kept on hard drives is often compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially 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 performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We can take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There is another advantage 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 a whole month. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.