Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data stored on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method requires plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. 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 Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, 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 Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very 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 semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We're able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.