Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field because data filed on HDDs is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method consumes a lot of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you will 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 websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We can take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's a further benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.