Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field because data kept on hard drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you can always recover any content that you erase by accident.