Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field as data located on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. 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 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 which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available 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 rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We're able to take full advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.