Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field as information kept on hard drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot 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. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced 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 kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is much better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective 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 which we keep need significantly less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.