Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field because data located on hard drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. 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 Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will quicken every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.