Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field as info recorded on hard drives is often compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server has to 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 Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm out there, 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 overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is a lot better than alternative algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need much less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.