Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information kept on hard disks is usually compressed in order to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every 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 drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to 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 extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will quicken every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.