Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field since info stored on hard drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is much better than all other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take a lot less space and they are generated quicker, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of your files and databases.