Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field as data located on hard drives is often compressed so as to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just 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. The process employs plenty of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code can 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 that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is much better than all the other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.