Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information located on hard disk drives is often compressed so as to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take 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

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is much better than other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That's why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need a lot less space and are generated faster, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.