Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field because information located on hard disk drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. 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 that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we can 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 need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is much better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and are generated faster, which enables us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.