Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information stored on hard disk drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process consumes a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially 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 sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's much better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need much less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.