Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field since info recorded on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This method requires plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies quicker and on less disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover any content that you could have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We are able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by accident.