Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field as info kept on HDDs is typically compressed in order to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We can take full advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.