Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field because information stored on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing data and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you can always recover any content that you delete by accident.