Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field since data located on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process needs plenty of processing time, so an internet hosting server should be powerful enough 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, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster 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 really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will speed up any website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.