Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field since data kept on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method consumes plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially 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 really well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's a lot better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That is why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep several daily backups of your files and databases.