Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info recorded on hard drives is generally compressed to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less 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 which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.