Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information stored on HDDs is often compressed in order to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We are able to benefit from the feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.