Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information kept on hard disks is usually compressed in order to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a cloud hosting account with us because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backup copies a lot faster and on reduced disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore any kind of content that you could have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is far better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.