Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field as info kept on hard disk drives is usually compressed to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method employs plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

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

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We're able to take full advantage of this feature regardless 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 a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's another advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by accident.