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 Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups much quicker and on less disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover any kind of content that you could have deleted by mistake.

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.