Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field as data recorded on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process needs a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. 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 Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, particularly 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 sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is much better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. Because of this sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.