Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field because info stored on hard disk drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. A lot of them remove just 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. The method uses plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly 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 quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies 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 take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, especially with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they take considerably less space than ordinary backups.