Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field because data stored on hard disks is usually compressed to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We're able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a lot 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 the majority of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you can always restore any content that you erase by mistake.