Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field since information stored on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This process consumes a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we are 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 take 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

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server 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 distinguishes LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take considerably less space compared to standard backups.