Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field because info stored on HDDs is usually compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method requires a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll 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 sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting 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 state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's significantly better than other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need significantly less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.