Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field since information filed on hard drives is typically compressed to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method requires a lot of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially 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 sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We can take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.