Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data kept on hard drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency based on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process consumes a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code could 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 runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the 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 servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is significantly better than other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take a lot less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of your files and databases.