Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field as information stored on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code can 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 employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet 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 other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore any kind of content that you could have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.