Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field as information located on HDDs is usually compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method consumes plenty of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the 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 very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

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