Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field as information filed on hard disk drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process uses plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm 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, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

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