Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field because info kept on hard disks is often compressed to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process consumes plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet 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 quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web 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 which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple 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.