Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field as info located on hard disk drives is generally compressed to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method requires plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's an additional reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.