Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field as data filed on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process employs a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code could 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 which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you will 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 overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's a further benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.