Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field as information recorded on HDDs is often compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm out there, 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 overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much faster, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they take considerably less space than standard backups.