Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data recorded on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This process needs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to 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 consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, 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 performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's much better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That is why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take significantly less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which enables us to have several daily backups of your files and databases.