Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field because info kept on hard disk drives is often compressed so as to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The method uses 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 instantly. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot 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 very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is significantly better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 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 Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site 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 are generated a lot faster, which enables us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.