Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field because info located on hard disks is typically compressed to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 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 identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced 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 stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is significantly better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require a lot less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.