Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data located on HDDs is typically compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This process consumes plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web 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 owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you can always restore any content that you delete by accident.