Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data kept on hard drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they take a lot less space than standard backups.