Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field since data kept on HDDs is usually compressed so as to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any 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 performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. 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 web 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 that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and 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 disk and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We're able to take advantage of this feature although it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never 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 fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.