Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field because info kept on hard disk drives is typically compressed to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration 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 Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced 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 sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed 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 higher compression ratio and it is considerably faster, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of numerous clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they need a lot less space compared to conventional backups.